


The Dark Matter

by AtroposSnipping



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Dark Arts, Dark Magic, Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Magical Realism, Menstruation, POV Hermione Granger, POV Severus Snape, Post-Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Romance, Time Travel, Time Turner, Virginity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 10:48:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 42,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28990965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtroposSnipping/pseuds/AtroposSnipping
Summary: Hermione is wound up in time and tripping over her morals, but when the Headmaster entrusts her with a mission in the summer between her third and fourth year, she finds herself shacked up in the shadows with the Potions Professor. AU after Prisoner of Azkaban. Dark. HG/SS.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Severus Snape, SS/HG relationship
Comments: 42
Kudos: 64





	1. Loop

* * *

**General Disclaimer** : I have no beta, so all errors are my own. All publically recognisable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story starts relatively tame here, but I'm expecting serious and frank dabbling in the Dark Arts and moral quandaries, which is why the story is rated explicit. Expect to have profanity, discussion of domestic violence, gore, rape, and sexually explicit acts. Please read at your own discretion.

* * *

_  
Just as the human mind cannot comprehend time,_   
_so it cannot comprehend the damage that will ensue_   
_if we presume to tamper with its laws._

— Professor Saul Croaker, Unspeakable  
  


* * *

**CHAPTER ONE**

**LOOP**

* * *

It was half an hour to curfew and Hermione was both working on the last of her Arithmancy homework for the summer in the Gryffindor common room, and running her fingers over the gold chain of her Time-Turner in the second-floor girl's lavatory.

Last year, this was the cubicle in which she'd emerged with a tail and whiskers – perhaps one her greatest failures to date – where Moaning Myrtle had dragged Professor Snape and Madam Pomfrey to bear witness to such disaster. And because Hermione preferred to think of life as a palimpsest, to rewrite over entire sections until the trauma blurred into one grey murk, this was also the site she'd designated to be her Fiasco Room.

This was to be her final tinkering in time, she was certain of that.

In approximately five minutes, the Hermione she _was_ would leave her homework and take her place in the cubicle beside her own, knock thrice on the dividing board, and she, the present version, would emerge after a minute's silence.

The routine, the structure, was essential to her continued success – every lunchtime, in the minutes after lunch, and in the final half-hour before curfew Hermione would perform her Adjustments, sometimes saving a Hufflepuff from clutches of older Slytherins with jinxes thrown from the shadows, or leaving under her pillow rolls of parchments that detailed the contents of surprise quizzes in Arithmancy and obscure ingredients in Potions that she'd never heard of. Perfection came at the cost of her rudimentary moralities, but she, with her Time-Turner, was entrusted to locate the boundaries and skirt them should she wish; of course, often this meant more Turning.

Just this past month she had rescued Sirius Black from the clutches of the Dementors, saved a hippogriff from slaughter, and managed to get Outstandings in every single assignment for the year. Even Potions, a subject in which she'd maintained a steady Exceeds Expectations, had finally succumbed – this was sometimes down to vast amounts of Time-Turning, the cost of which were migraines that lasted days, and a stomach that was always pumped empty. Despite Dumbledore's and McGonagall's warnings, she'd turn the maximum five hours back, and then again when she arrived, maybe even a third time, turn after turn, rewriting her homework with the aid of Snape's acerbic red scrawl in the margins of her essays, and then carefully switching them in her bag before she handed them in; often she hid under disillusion charms in this same cubicle, until it was time to resume her place in her timeline. Myrtle paid her little attention, the ghost having relocated to the Prefect's Bathroom these days, perhaps knowing her site of death was haunted by something else . . .

Hermione's fingers continued to stroke the chain, and she was once again attempting to count the specks of enchanted sand in the, flowing between the chambers. Once, on a particularly uneventful bout of Adjusting, she had witnessed that for every minute four grains of sand would pass, and thus all Ministry certified Time-Turners, contained 240 specks, and it would take 1200 (five complete turns) to max out one ride. But upon arrival, you need only wait until the nausea had passed to begin turning back again – at your own peril, of course, and Hermione was well-used to peril.

She heard her own steady footsteps, the sobs. 'Stupid, stupid, stupid. There's no need to be so sentimental. No need.' The latch of the door. Her weight falling atop the toilet, the clatter of the seat. _Knock. Knock. Knock_. 'Goodnight, Hermione!' she heard, her own voice sounding so alien and foreign.

'Good luck, Hermione!' she replied.

* * *

Morning came. It was the final day of term, an entirely blank canvas, and Hermione had an appointment straight after breakfast with Professor Dumbledore. She planned to return the Time-Turner, but Hermione woke to see a scrap of parchment peeking out from under her pillow, and she groaned loudly. Her roommates shuffled in their beds.

'Sorry!' it said, in her own loopy handwriting. 'It will all make sense. Turn after meeting.'

Hermione reached for her wand. 'Incendio,' she said, and she was holding soft ash.

In her fury, she jumped out of bed, the cloaked Time-Turner warm against her skin, and headed to the bathroom to sort herself out. When she entered the bathroom, Parvati Patel was already stood with her hair wrapped in a pastel-green towel, massaging some sweet-smelling lotion into her cheeks, and she smiled at Hermione but they did not speak. Parvati and herself had a muted sort of friendship that was shown in gestures like sharing shampoo and sometimes pouring one another tea at breakfast.

Every September Hermione would promise herself that she would get to know the girls in her dorm, and every year she was bogged down with more homework, more existentially troubling circumstances than she knew what to do with. Perhaps the Time-Turner could be invested here, here where she was so woefully lacking in female comradery – she thought on this for the entirety of her shower, and then sighed knowing that it would probably remain another unfulfilled resolution.

Stepping out, pink-skinned and raw, Hermione almost walked into Lavender Brown, dressed in a cherry red bra and shorts, who sneered and pushed past her. Lavender had begun to menstruate this spring, though it was all hush-hush, as these things were. But it meant Lavender had become the undisputed alpha female of the dorm – which was fine with Hermione, for in her trio of friends she was decidedly mother enough, period or no period, flat-chested or not; she glanced down at the front of her camisole where there seemed, for the first time in her memory, something identifiably breast-like.

'About time,' she said, knowing that she was ageing a lot faster than her classmates and would continue to do so. In the mirror, the girl who looked back was her but sickly. The pink flush from her shower had faded, her eyes were sunken and dark. The inner reflected the outer. She felt like a sheet of filo pastry her mother insisted on making at home, stretched so thin and fine that she could probably read _Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts_ through it – or, in her mother's case, _The Guardian_ newspaper.

After dressing and packing up the remainder of her luggage, Hermione headed down to the final breakfast of her third year. Last night at the feast Gryffindor had won the House Cup, and the banners were still up – everything warm-toned and mellow, everything she would miss over the summer.

She spooned herself a ladle full of porridge and ate, watching the students trickle in through the doors, dragging their feet, rubbing the sleep from their eyes.

At head table sat Professor Snape, leafing through a journal; he met her eye immediately, and she grinned recalling her Outstanding, and he looked to incline his head at her in some form of greeting or acknowledgement, but was probably just getting back to his book. Professor Dumbledore was stood beside the ghost and History of Magic teacher Binns, the two talking loudly on the historic abuses of dragonkind by the goblins. Professor Sinistra, the Astronomy lecturer, had her head turned to the enchanted ceiling but her eyes shut, one hand stirred her tea, the other whizzing across parchment.

When Hermione sought to help herself to a second serving of porridge, Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley arrived, her closest friends, but Dumbledore smiled from head table, getting to his feet. So, Hermione stood too. 'I'll probably see you two on the train,' she said. 'I'm meeting with Professor Dumbledore before I head down there myself.'

'About what?' asked Ron, dunking a slice of buttered toast into his tea. Harry lightly elbowed him, and nodded to Hermione, eyebrows raised. 'Oh!' said Ron, catching on, chewing the sodden bread. 'Do you have to? Can't you just—'

'We've talked about this, Ron. It was always the plan.' And then she waved and sped off to catch up with Dumbledore, the man moving rather quickly for someone who'd lived much longer than a century.

'Ah, Miss Granger,' he said when she fell into step with him. 'Lovely day isn't it?' Hermione frowned, looking to the ashen skies, aware of her shirt sticking to her back in the muggy heat. 'I expect quite a storm.'

'Yes, Professor. I think so too.' And then, after a beat of silence and remembering the topic of his conversation with Binns, she asked, 'Do you think there may be uses for dragon's blood that you've not discovered yet?'

Dumbledore chuckled. 'Why do you ask?'

Hermione smiled, always a little self-conscious in the company of intellectuals. 'It's only that . . . I gifted my father a vial of Norwegian Ridgeback blood at Christmas—for the sheer novelty of it, you understand—and he suggested that the viscosity and scent was rather like petrol, which got me thinking.'

'Go on.'

'Well, I wondered whether you've considered dragon's blood as a potential fuel substitute . . . ? Their fire does not erupt from nothingness, and has more uses than oven cleaner, I feel.'

Dumbledore looked down at the girl, contemplative, and rested a hand on her shoulder as they came to the entrance of his office. 'Sesame Spindles,' he said, and gestured her to walk on up ahead. 'Miss Granger, that line of research may serve to be rather fertile. It's always seemed too obvious to take seriously, but it remains untapped.'

'It seems logical,' she said, 'they breathe fire, after all! And muggles use petrol and petrol derivatives for absolutely everything!'

'Miss Granger,' he said, taking a seat behind his office, and gesturing her to do the same in the opposite upholstered chair, 'you must understand that, unlike the muggle world, the wizarding world has entrusted fire to a select few: the alchemists, the potions masters, the persevering candle, and the Floo, dragons to their keepers in the East. Fire scorches, and good salve is hard to come by.' Fawkes chirped from his stand, and Hermione looked to the bird, wondering what strange magic tied the Dumbledores to such rare and entrancing creatures. 'Yes, the phoenixes. Their fire belongs to rebirth alone.'

'Professor,' she said, frowning, 'I have read something along those lines . . .'

'It would be most fascinating if you have.'

_Oh._

An image of herself handling a book with her dragonskin gloves came to mind: she was sitting in the dark of the Restricted Section in a bout of curfew Adjustment last winter, hidden under the strongest cloaking spell she knew, and reading by a dim _lumos_.

The book in question was _The Nightshade Guide to Necromancy_ , not your usual third-year spell book – indeed, no book for a school at all; it detailed the arduous process of creating all manner of necrotic beings, some like the Inferi, corpses reanimated and mindless, dancing to the whim of any witch or wizard with enough mettle and blood to conjure them. Voldemort, at the height of his power, had created a legion of Inferi that laid dormant and in his control to this day – or so was the rumour.

Hermione had read in the introduction to _The Nightshade Guide_ , penned by an ancestor of Professor Dumbledore named Belladonna, that the darkest magics known in the world were Horcrux-making—something Hermione had never heard mentioned in any book the School library held—and the harnessing of phoenix fire, for it belonged to their rebirth alone. 'To suspend such an unpolluted and chaste creature in the amber of pain,' Belladonna wrote, 'was the greatest sin.'

'In the _Nightshade Guide_ ,' she said. 'It was written by your—'

'Five times great grandmother on my father's side,' he said, staring at her over his half-moon spectacles. 'A remarkable witch, by all accounts.'

'Was she not Dark, Professor?'

Dumbledore beamed. 'Miss Granger,' he said, ' _Hermione_ '—she felt the heat rise in her cheeks at the grandfatherly ease at which he said her name—'the two are hardly mutually exclusive. Dark wizards do the most extraordinary things.' As Dumbledore spoke, several paintings in his office huffed and exclaimed, affronted. 'We live in the long shadow of their gall, and by the determination of those who stand against them.'

'Like you stood against Grindelwald?'

It was Dumbledore's cheeks that turned ruddy now, and he shuffled in his seat, rearranging his heavily embroidered scarlet robes. 'Perhaps, perhaps. Have you decided on the fate of your Time-Turner, my dear?'

Hermione unclasped it from behind her neck and held the weightless hourglass in her hand. The sand lay unperturbed, unmoving. Logically, she knew that she'd somehow hold on to it – she had received that note from her future self, of course, but she'd yet to find out why. Surely, researching another use for dragon's blood was not enough. There must be something else.

'I keep it,' she said, looking up at the pensive man. 'I don't know why; it's brought me nothing but nervousness this year, I am positively barmy, Professor. But I keep it for some reason.'

'And how have you come to know this?'

'I left— _will leave_ —myself a note.'

Dumbledore nodded, but the wringing of his hands gave away his frustration. 'Hermione,' he said. 'you're interacting with yourself. This is . . . unorthodox. We talked about the risk.'

Hermione shook her head vehemently. 'No, no,' she said. 'I never make mistakes. And I never _really_ interact with myself.'

'But you do on some level?'

She thought to this morning. 'It's the self-fulfilling prophecy, Professor. I never go back in time and change events, acting for entirely different future – I don't know how to do that!' She had the acute sense that she had told a fib to the Headmaster, but she couldn't pin it down. When Dumbledore had asked her to save Sirius and Buckbeak, she had gone back in time with Harry to explicitly change those events. But she was always going to do this. She had caught a glimpse of her own hair. On that day, two Hermiones (and two Harrys) were conspiring against the Minister and the axe-wielder McNair – one in ignorant past, and one from the future. She hated thinking on the loops of time, on how many instances she had crossed her own timeline, and divulging this to Dumbledore was not an intelligent move. She wondered, even now, about what the future Hermione was doing in this timeline; she had left her the note this morning, but would she camp out until noon in Myrtle's bathroom? 'It's the self-fulfilling prophecy,' she said again.

'But you understand what's just happened here, child?' Dumbledore's voice raised the hair on her arms, made gooseflesh erupt on the nape of her neck. 'By telling me that you keep the Time-Turner, we are propelled towards realising that future. I cannot take it from you. You must keep it if only to go back and give yourself that note.'

'I know,' Hermione groaned, dropping her face into her hands, mortified. 'I understand.'

'And do you regret it?'

She looked up at Dumbledore, who was as serious as ever. His eyes belied no mirth. The portraits were silent. Fawkes was staring. The dull roar of the schoolchildren in the castle, stilted. 'Do I regret what, Headmaster?'

'Bearing the burden of Time?'

'Not at all,' she answered quickly. 'It's no burden.'

'So, you could stand more?'

'Of course,' she said, unthinking. 'Of course.'

'In that case,' he said, getting to his feet with a muffled groan, coming around to her side of the desk and offering her a handful of lemon sherbets, 'I have a proposition for you.'


	2. The Greater Good

* * *

_  
Time present and time past_   
_Are both perhaps present in time future,_   
_And time future contained in time past._   
_If all time is eternally present_   
_All time is unredeemable._   
_What might have been is an abstraction_   
_Remaining a perpetual possibility_   
_Only in a world of speculation._   
_What might have been and what has been_   
_Point to one end, which is always present._

— T. S. Eliot, _Burnt Norton  
  
_

* * *

**CHAPTER TWO**

**THE GREATER GOOD**

* * *

In the Fiasco Room sat Hermione waiting for herself.

She had spent the better part of the morning hidden beneath her own bed in Gryffindor tower, following a serious misjudgement on how quickly she'd rouse herself with a quick shove of a note under a pillow. Hermione thanked Lavender's stellar knowledge of household charms when all she encountered were the clean floors – not a mote of dust nor house spider in sight, no stray sock or hair clip. It was times like these she became acutely aware of the gaps in her magical education, jolted awake, suffering the reality of being a muggleborn witch. In some fantasies with the Time-Turner, in some daydreams in toilet cubicles, Hermione imagined a world where she could turn back years and live out school again, claiming she was a long-lost pureblood witch, just so she'd never hear a Slytherin whisper _mudblood_ in her wake – sometimes, she would deign to put aside her pride.

And then, a muffled groan, a whispered _incendio_. Hermione watched her own bony feet dart out of the room, turn left at the door towards the girls' communal baths.

It was an hour later, at nine o'clock, when the dorm was finally clear. The rest of the girls had got dressed and had headed down to breakfast, but would be coming back soon enough to do the remainder of their packing. In that window of time, Hermione _disillusioned_ herself and crept out of the common room, heading straight for the safety of her Fiasco Room where she'd wait until 11.35. There were still hours to go, but she needed the time to ruminate on her long, meandering conversation with Dumbledore . . .

* * *

'I have a proposition for you,' said Dumbledore, pressing seven lemon sherbets into her hands, which she pocketed. 'I am certain you're well-placed for the task, all I need is your cooperation.'

Hermione's tongue was pressed firmly to the roof of her mouth, her jaw clenched tight. She found herself breathing quick. 'This is what faith feels like,' she thought, 'this is the weight of responsibility.' And, 'What must I do?' she said.

Dumbledore smiled, and walked to where Fawkes sat upon his perch, the two sharing a long look. 'Ever since you and dear Harry saved Sirius, I've been thinking. I have thought for many hundreds of hours, in fact, on whether we—you, I, even poor Harry who knew not what he was getting himself into—whether we committed some grave sin.'

Hermione blinked quickly, fear settling into the pit of her stomach, her teeth audibly grinding against one another, gnashing in her tightly closed mouth. 'Of course,' she thought, recollecting all the hours that she herself had questioned the very act, not knowing—not even now—whether it was right, yet believing that it was always to play out the way it had. 'How do you mean, Sir?'

Dumbledore was silent, still staring at Fawkes. The moment his eyes flickered to Hermione the bird burst into flames. The Headmaster stepped back from the blaze, his face warmed by the heat and glow, pink. Hermione was at her feet before she knew it, standing beside the man. Fawkes, as if he were a strand of hair, burned fleetingly – that awful fire, brilliant ochre – alight for only a handful of seconds. She thought to Belladonna's words, knowing now just how dark a spell or ritual must be to capture and bottle something so ephemeral. After a stagnant moment, life rumbled from the ash, and the bird grew from the char and nothingness. ' _This_ ,' Hermione thought, 'was true magic.'

'I have been thinking,' said Dumbledore, tickling Fawkes' mustard-coloured beak, 'whether we have upset the tricksy balance of the universe with our meddling. Or, maybe, if I am to share the more terrible of these ruminations with you on this morning, Hermione, whether our job wasn't to just save a life, but to equalise the scales by taking another . . . for the greater good, you understand.'

She felt the old man's eyes watching her now, waiting for some spark of fury or offence, but Hermione felt too numb to react. The greater good – how many lives had already been taken, how many witches and wizards had died for those words? The books said countless. The books said more than they could ever know. 'I think,' said Hermione, her voice as steady as she could manage, 'in the name of the greater good, we have already lost too much.'

The wizard winced. 'And how much of this . . . _philosophy_ do you know, Hermione? Are you familiar with its origins?'

'I know enough,' she said. 'About Gellert Grindelwald, that is.' She met Dumbledore's eyes, and there was something there that made her add, 'But perhaps not all you do, Professor, you being the one who . . . put an end to him and his rule.' Dumbledore's eyes twinkled with a dark mirth that almost made the girl shiver – she could not imagine the old man hurting so much as a fly, but in moments like this (of which there had been decidedly few) she could see why Dark witches and wizards the world over feared him. 'Is there something I _should_ know?' she asked. 'Of those origins?'

Dumbledore went back around to his desk, leaving the newborn Fawkes. Hermione resumed her place on the other side, eyes flitting over the organised chaos on the surface: littered with all manner of stationery and tomes.

'Gellert and I,' said Dumbledore, 'were friends, long before we stood against one another.' When she made to speak, Dumbledore raised a hand to stay her. 'It's best if I get this out together, Hermione, your questions may be answered . . . I met Gellert at eighteen, in 1899, he was a little younger than I, but a man possessed with notions of glory, nonetheless, even then. He was staying at Godric's Hollow—forever a sight of the most fearful deeds in Wizarding history—with his great-aunt, the famous historian and author of _A History of Magic_ , Bathilda Bagshot. A wonderful witch, and though I'm hardly one to speak on such matters, very near the end of her life.

'We had long, impassioned conversations, Gellert and I, about our fear of forever leading lives in secrecy. Because we, in our naïve youth, believed that the muggles would benefit greatly if we were to . . . _guide them._ Which is perhaps a rather inappropriate way of describing our craving to rule like kings over the muggles,' he said rather quickly, the words spilling forth as if a tap had been tugged on. 'We were barely older than yourself, Hermione, but those were times that innocence was stripped bitterly and quickly. Our awful pasts left us impressionable to Dark thought and spells, our souls craved the power.

'And you cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, inflamed me. Muggles forced into subservience, we wizards triumphant. Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution. Oh, I had scruples. I assuaged my conscience with empty words. It would all be for the greater good, and any harm done would be repaid a hundredfold in benefits for wizards. Did I know in my heart of hearts, what Gellert Grindelwald was? I think I did, but I closed my eyes. If the plans we were making came to fruition, all my dreams would come true.*

'But Gellert and I would not be so friendly for long . . . My siblings—yes, it is always a matter of great surprise—Aberforth, who now lives and works in Hogsmeade and I see so rarely, and Ariana my dearest sister who I see but through the film of sleep . . . Miss Granger'—Dumbledore leaned forward in his chair, staring at the bewildered Hermione with watery eyes—'she was rather like you at one point, so brimming with life, so intelligent, so wise even in her brief childhood, cruelly snatched. Aberforth, one evening, overheard Gellert and I speaking, sensed the _ardour_ between us, and he, who had so recently seen our father succumbed by his own hatred of muggles, could not abide it. In that inevitable quarrel, in that terrible duel, Ariana lost her life. Gellert fled, taking our senseless and misplaced philosophies with him, using them to wreak havoc for decades.'

Hermione felt like crying, feeling as if she'd been both betrayed and saved by the man in front of her. Knowing, that if it were not for him, perhaps Grindelwald may not have taken up his Dark mantle, and if it were not for Dumbledore, Grindelwald would still be at large today. And so much of Voldemort's own thinking was just in the vein of Grindelwald, a repurposing, a honing. She was sat in front of the man who had incensed them both.

'You must have many questions,' said Dumbledore, sitting back in his seat, his clasped hands pressed to his chin, and he watched her carefully as he spoke.

'Too many,' she agreed, clearing the lump in her throat. 'But perhaps the most pertinent for the moment, and the least prying to my mind is—.' She paused for a moment, the words a muddle in her brain, wanting to know more about Grindelwald and the Headmaster's _arduous_ relationship, the exact reason for Ariana's killing, but knowing that this was perhaps not the best time, that she had no business of asking into the personal matters of the Headmaster's personal life. 'I think, Professor, having travelled so very often in time this year—though by no means an expert, of course—I have been doing some reading, both muggle and magic, on the nature of Time. And honestly? I'm just not convinced that time works in the way the wizarding world thinks.'

Dumbledore barked out a laugh. Hermione jumped in her seat. 'And how do _you_ suppose time works, Hermione?' he asked, mirth shining in his eyes, his voice laced with some cousin feeling of condescension.

She frowned. 'Muggle physics cannot know for certain but . . . _I think_ it works in a closed loop,' she said. 'On the day that we saved Buckbeak and Sirius, I recall a brief moment . . . where, I could have sworn, Professor, I saw myself! Briefly. By Hagrid's pumpkins. Just a glimpse of my face in the trees. I didn't know I would go back then, _obviously_ —I never get this feeling now, because I'm always telling myself when I should be travelling that day. But later, when Harry and I Turned, I saw the same scene play out again . . . I saw my past self in my own present, look back and briefly see _me_. It was always bound to happen that way.' She nodded furiously, speaking faster and faster, breathless by the end. Who was Hermione convincing? Herself? Dumbledore? Or was she pleading to the portraits? She didn't know.

'You're making the case for predestination rather well, my child.'

'Predestination,' said Hermione, tasting the word in her mouth. 'Yes. Yes, that is what I believe.'

'So, you believe in the magic of muggles.'

' _Pardon_?'

'Religion,' Dumbledore clarified, smiling. 'The Abrahamic faith is rife with these magics, the magic of faith. My own mother was quite the enthusiast.'

'This conversation is taking an odd turn,' Hermione thought. 'I'm not a devout believer,' she said, 'but I've attended Church with my parents, who are now Quakers. And once I visited a mosque in Birmingham on a primary school trip, which was a moving experience at such a young age . . . But whether I believe in _God_ or not is still up in the air, so to speak, Professor.'

Dumbledore was looking at her strangely now, as if with a niggling of doubt, as if she had corrupted herself further with such attitudes – there was always the matter of her blood she would have to contend with, though Dumbledore being a half-blood himself and champion of the muggleborns would be the last person to hold it against her.

Once, in her first year at Hogwarts, Hermione had come across something rather base written in a Muggle Studies textbook, describing religion as squib basterdization, a pathetic attempt at true magic; she was taught it at face-value, as if it were fact. She remembered the indignant look of the other muggleborn students, their waving hands of protest in the classroom; she remembered the tears in Pavarti's eyes who, though pureblood, was a strict Hindu: it was an insult. The experiential magics, the magic that was taught at Hogwarts, channelling the inner spark through the wand cores, and translating that urge through Latin spells, had always been at odds with her mind to the dogma and introspection of religion. However, there was something to be said for the hundreds gathered in pews reading hymns, or the hundreds of thousands that circled around Mecca, that felt like it was reaching towards an actual magical ritual; anything would be answered, should you say the right words, have the right intentions.

'Once,' said Hermione soberly, 'multitudes in the past, we set ourselves on this course. Predestination, kismet, are often used interchangeably with a perceived lack of agency, an afront on our free will, but I like to remind myself rather often that I'm in charge. And in any case, these theories are perpetuated by the religious and secular alike – there is no place for gut-feelings and hope in hard science.'

Dumbledore chuckled, and looked at her over the rim of his half-moon spectacles. 'You, Hermione, are wise beyond your years, _far beyond your years_ ,' he said. 'Your words soothe me more than I can say.' Hermione blushed. 'Still, I don't believe you've asked the most important question.'

She nodded, knowing that she'd been skirting it long enough. 'Though I disagree with the premise,' she said, 'because I don't believe in restoring balance for the greater good, I can think of at least one person who we should have focused on that day . . . who we should have got, had we thought of it.'

'And who might that be?'

'Peter Pettigrew,' she said.

'Peter Pettigrew,' Dumbledore echoed. 'Indeed. When I spoke to Harry that night, he told me of a prophecy delivered that same day to him by Professor Trelawney.' Hermione scoffed, and the Headmaster smiled, but something in her eyes stopped her for any further derision. 'She made a prediction: before midnight, the servant would break free and set out to re-join his master, and the Dark Lord would rise again with that servant's aid, greater and more fearsome than her ever was.'

'And you believe she's an actual seer?' Hermione sniggered, the image of the kooky professor solid in her mind, her whole subject an utter waste of all the time she turned to attend the classes.

Dumbledore was no longer smiling. 'This is not a matter of belief, Hermione. I know she is.' The girl grew silent, her heart in her throat. When she opened her mouth to question it further, Dumbledore shook his head. 'I cannot explain now, my dear, but know it's true. Sybil is, ironically enough, a true clairvoyant – though her prophesies infrequent . . . It is virtually impossible now to stop the first part of her prophecy, the servant—Pettigrew, of course—has broken free, and soon enough he will find and re-join his master. We have a small and undetermined window of time between then and now, and the only person I know on the side of the Light who can prolong that, sits before me this morning.'

* * *

Hermione's task, seemingly impossible to her mind still, was to find some way to track Peter Pettigrew's movements; a man who had spent twelve long years parading as an actual rat familiar to the Weasley brothers, who had pulled off one of the greatest cons in recent history by framing Sirius Black for the death of the Potters, and she was tasked to find him as if he was going to turn up at the Leakey Cauldron any time soon, and offer to pay the tab for everyone present. It was an impossible assignment, and the only thing she had on her side was her Time-Turner, and apparently a library at her disposal.

That latter point was the most startling of all the revelations from that conversation. Hermione was going to have a library full of books. A library. And Dumbledore had handed her what seemed like her weight in galleons to buy anything else she may need. The location of said library she was to find out later, but by the twinkle in the Headmaster's eyes, she knew that it would be no paradise.

Hermione pulled out some parchment from her bag and began writing a letter to her parents, jotting down her excuses for not making it back this summer. Using words like 'fantastic opportunity' and 'future career prospects' and 'held in scholarly regard'. These were buzzwords, of course, but shorthand for her parents who, though were academics in their own rights, were always a little surprised when she came home with a glowing report card. But knowing her words were probably not enough, Dumbledore had confirmed that he'd be asking Professor McGonagall to pay her parents a visit this evening to assuage and allay all their trepidations. To the Granger parents, Hermione would be attending summer school in the depths of the Black Lake with the merepeople, at the only underwater academy in this hemisphere – she felt terrible telling them such a wild fiction, but Dumbledore was rather excited about using the story, as if he had spent rather a long time ironing out the nuance of it all.

All that was left at that point was for Hermione to tie her Time-Turner back around her neck, do all her necessary Turning, and meet the Headmaster back in his office once the coast was clear. She would not be saying goodbye to Ron or Harry, after all, lamenting the passing of another school year.

'For me,' she thought, 'it has been an entire year.' Indeed, with her additional ten hours of turning every day, she would be adding three more days to her week, a month of almost forty days. And for every three months she had aged four. By the end of the school year, Hermione had calculated (with her most conservative estimates), she'd pushed back her birthday by a whole year – the thought turned her stomach. Her more generous estimates, those that were far more honest than she'd acknowledge, predicated the change to be far greater. Nonetheless, she told herself, this September she would not turn fifteen but sixteen.

_Sixteen._

Over her robes, Hermione cupped the breast she'd noticed earlier in the day. She imagined her mother, Jean, taking her to Marks & Spencer and picking out an entirely utilitarian beige bra in the smallest size, thrusting it towards her. She would wear it and she would feel almost a woman. She would go home and walk around her room in her boring bra. She, with the curtains drawn, may even dance.

Hermione, sitting in the damp bathroom, hearing the voices of her schoolmates grow quieter, thinking on Professor Trelawny's prophecy and her mission for Dumbledore, knew that there was every likelihood of her never seeing that bedroom ever again, but she resolved to at least the attempt, the hope.

* * *

* Albus Dumbledore to Harry Potter, Chapter 22, _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_


	3. [Dis]apparate

* * *

**CHAPTER THREE**

**[DIS]APPARATE**

* * *

It was 12.05 p.m. and Hermione still sat in her cubicle. She'd heard the footsteps, the slamming shut of the door, the knocking, the breathing halt in the space beside her. But in the half-hour or so that had passed, she was remiss to muster up the courage to meet Dumbledore. He'd said that he would be departing from the grounds at exactly half-past noon, and she was to meet him and her landlord for the summer by the stairs which led up to his office. But every minute spent here in her dank haven, where she hadn't formally walked into an arrangement she'd regret, was a minute of virtue. Beyond this space, in the summer realm, every second she spent in her research and search for Pettigrew would be a second she was betting against Voldemort's return. Time had never been so precious. Time had never been so fickle.

Six minutes later, Hermione got to her feet. Her head swimming as she did, black floaters sparking across her eyes: head rush. She'd read in multiple books on magical time theory, that extended travel would manifest physically, and one of those signs was anaemia. The wizarding world had over-the-counter potions to cure this—she'd seen the Metal Moste Momentary potion advertised in the apothecary window in Hogsmeade, supposedly perfecting the body's balance of iron, copper, and manganese—but Hermione had used the last of her Knuts to order Harry some shirts from Madam Malkins to take home, believing money wouldn't be much of an issue come the end of June, and Harry's muggle clothes were looking more than a little threadbare—though, of course, he would never admit to these things. Just as she got to her feet and the dizziness passed, Hermione became conscious of the weight of the pouch of gold in her pocket, and she remembered that money was suddenly no object.

'Was this the price of a clean conscious,' she thought, 'or a burdened one?'

Hermione looked down to the bags at her feet. The trunk was filled with books padded with her winter jumpers and socks, and two linen totes piled high with her neatly folded clothes and robes. She had been researching some kind of magic-efficient way to travel with luggage, and all signs were pointing towards an Undetectable Extension charm. Now was as good a time as any to try, and she had just the bag. Her mother, before sending her off to school last September, had bequeathed to her two bags: one, a squat purple beaded affair which was pretty but would draw unnecessary attention if she began pulling leather-bound hardback books out in public, the second a wide, attractive satchel in leather tanned so dark it was almost black. She tugged out the bag from her trunk, emptied it of any loose parchment, and cleaned it with a quick _Scourgify_ , followed with a _Tergio_ for good measure.

With her back against the door, she set the bag atop the closed lid of the toilet. She tugged her vine-wood wand from her robe pocket, and with a stiff wrist, angling the wand to the ceiling created a sharp cyclone of magic. All the research she'd done had insisted that this charm, rather like most charms, was highly temperamental: the more magic you channelled, the more powerful your results, and she wanted a space at least as big as the Great Hall. _At least_. 'Capacious extremis,' she said clearly, thrusting the tip of her wand at the bag, holding an image of the hall in her mind, envisaging its proportions as clearly as she could – a ladder to climb down, shelves aplenty, herringbone floors, a triple-height ceiling. The tempest, bathed now in lavender light, engulfed her bag. The emerald silk which lined it grew discoloured at the edges, where it had been sewn into the leather, but aside from that, nothing seemed too much different when the light faded. Picking it up, it seemed a little lighter – a good indicator, since part of the spell was a mass-reduction Feather-Light charm.

Peering tentatively inside, the green silk seemed to be endless. From the far edge, a glint of brass – where the ladder rungs began. Ironically enough, Hermione knew she hadn't the time to get lost in a handbag now, but vowed to further explore her terrarium when she didn't feel the bellyache of procrastination. She merely cast a cushioning charm on the bottom of the bag, _Reducio_ on her belongings, and with a _Wingardium Leviosa_ had lowered her affects into the satchel.

'Easy enough,' she said, tucking her wand back into her robes.

* * *

It was 12.23 p.m. when Hermione arrived at the entrance to Dumbledore's office. She'd counted just six feathers on the unsightly stone gryphon before the staircases revolved, and down darted the Headmaster with Professor Snape closely behind – a flurry of dark robes, in barbed contrast with Dumbledore's scarlet robes, a scab following the blood.

'Ah,' said Dumbledore, resting a hand on Snape's shoulder, smiling at her. 'We're early!' Hermione looked between the two men, and realisation dawned upon her with the speed of a sneeze. Snape, of course, was well aware of the circumstances and looked to have resigned himself to his fate – though, she noticed, his eyes were belying his impartiality. 'I daresay, Severus, we've still kept young Hermione waiting.'

'It would seem so . . .'

'Am I'—she met Snape's eye, clearing her throat—'staying with you, Sir?'

He rolled his eyes and inclined his head.

'Now, now, Severus,' Dumbledore chided. 'You're to be more loquacious than that, else you might drive Hermione up the wall . . . Just this afternoon she, as young as she is, hypothesised another use for dragon's blood that has been right in front of our eyes all along! Minerva may very well be correct; she is truly the brightest mind of her generation.'

Hermione blushed. 'Oh, I don't know about that Professor.'

Snape's eyes narrowed. 'Is that so,' he said, turning to Dumbledore. 'Miss Granger happening upon something that even _the_ Albus Dumbledore did not foresee?'

She felt her hackles raise. ' _Happen upon_?' she thought. 'Professor,' she said, evenly as she could, 'it was a little more considered than that.'

'Is that so?'

'Yes.' Afterall, she had set a few millimetres of the gifted Norwegian Ridgeback blood alight.

That day, when her father Robert posed the theory, the two—trusting empirical evidence above all—had undergone a spot of familial bonding. They had gone out into the garden, poured a shallow pipette of blood onto the centre of a stray paving stone, moved to the middle of their lawn. Hermione wished she could perform a quick _Incendio_ , set the blood alight from a safe distance – though, there was the small matter of the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery, and she vowed to track her age better, know the exact numbers so she'd know when it was no longer an issue. Hermione's father, with his muggle resourcefulness, had built a rather ingenious contraption with wooden chopsticks; they had taped together a four-meter pole, set the tip alight, and touched it to the small splash of viscous blood on the paving stone. And, as they theorised, the blood burned – burned without end, in fact, in a narrow foot-high column of green flame. They had to quell the fire by setting (and ruining) her mother's vase atop, starving the fire of oxygen.

'You see, I ran a test,' she clarified, 'before posing it to Professor Dumbledore.'

'And what may I ask is this luckless thirteenth use of dragon's blood?' he asked, crossing his arms.

'Fuel,' she said. 'And potentially a petrochemical substitute.'

He blinked. 'Petrol?'

'Yes,' she said. 'Dragons breathe fire. Petrol burns aflame. It was logical. Fire.'

'Three points from Gryffindor,' he snapped. 'For your brazen cheek, Miss Granger.'

Dumbledore chuckled. 'School's out as the children say, Severus.'

Hermione smiled sheepishly at the indignant teacher. 'Apologies, Professor.'

'For your cheek, Miss Granger, or for my displeasure in not being able to take away points?'

'Both,' she said, sharing an amused smile with Dumbledore, 'naturally.'

And then, all at once, the blaze of revulsion in Snape's dark eyes dimmed a fraction. 'Victory?' she thought. 'So soon?' It certainly felt like it, though she schooled her expression. She doubted the Potions Master would treat her too kindly if she extended any more of her overfamiliarity towards him at the moment—her Gryffindorness, she figured, would have to be set on the back burner for the summer; any indication that it was welcome, however, and she'd pounce.

'Now,' said Dumbledore, gesturing them all to walk on, the three falling into step together, 'I shall escort you both to the Apparition point. From there, Miss Granger, you shall disapparate with Severus to his home, where you'll remain for the summer. He has been briefed on your . . . _assignment_.'

'Hardly,' Snape muttered.

Dumbledore tutted. 'Such a sceptic you are, Severus.'

Hermione kept her growing mirth at the two's easy rapport to herself. Professor Dumbledore had probably known Snape for most of the latter's life. As they cleared the threshold of the School itself, and they began making their way towards Hagrid's hut and the Forbidden Forest beyond it, an image of herself twenty years in the future past before here waking eyes. It was her, of course, but a little grey at the temples, with the Headmaster much like he was now, though walking with the aid of an elaborate walking stick. Wizarding folk had been known to live for nigh on 180 years, and the chances of surpassing that grew with an individual witch's or wizard's magical potency; Fred and George Weasley had hundreds of Galleons tied in various bets on Dumbledore hitting 200, at the very least.

Dumbledore's and Snape's conversation did throw something up for Hermione, however, and, in a moment of impulsiveness, her right hand darted out to grab the velvet-trimmed sleeve of the Headmaster's robes and she gave it a little tug – Dumbledore looked down at the girl with a smile, and slowed in his steps, the two letting Snape walk a little ahead of them, down the steep grassy hills towards Hagrid's hut.

'Sorry for that, Headmaster,' she quietly said. 'I was just wondering . . . how much can I share with Professor Snape? And how much does he already know?'

'I trust Severus Snape with my life,' he said. 'As should you—'

'—Of course.'

'Yes. Though, he does not know . . . the specifics of how you've been getting help this year. Nor should he.'

'You'd like me to l—'

'Not lie, Hermione. _Never lie_. Just . . . be selective with the truth.'

'For the greater good, Professor?' she asked.

He looked down at her sharply and the two stopped in their careful paces, now twenty meters or so further up the uneven steps than Snape. The wind howled, and their robes whipped around their legs. 'He knows you _have_ the Time-Turner _now_ , Hermione, but not that you've _had_ it. I have neither confirmed nor denied his suspicions—he has suspicions, yes—but I know he will not react kindly and will expect some further foul-play,' he said. 'It may become necessary when you absolutely must divulge the whole truth, and you will let circumstance judge whether that be appropriate.'

'And if not,' she said, 'I take it I can just go back in time and stop myself?'

'Well, indeed,' said the Headmaster. 'You have opportunities to _course-correct_ , as the muggles say. They become limited in such close quarters, but opportunities, nonetheless. '

'Professor Dumbledore,' Hermione said, 'what exactly does Professor Snape think I'm doing with him over the summer?'

He chuckled, and the two resumed their walking. 'Severus has become my closest confidant, and I suppose, in many respects, I am his and a fair deal more. He knows, Miss Granger, of the entirety of your mission and even if he was being uncharacteristically dim, I doubt it would take much for him to figure out. And he should be kept up to date with all your advancements, Hermione, you are to report to him for _anything_ you should need or discover. However, you're not to fall into the habit of taking directions from him; Professor Snape has his own tasks to be doing this summer, and you will remain on his better side if you take initiative. He is of the . . . _prickly_ sort, much like our dearest Buckbeak,' he chuckled, nodding to the hut as they passed it, 'proud to the bitter end. I expect you'll be doing a lot of bowing in the early days, Miss Granger!'

'I do not doubt it,' she said.  
  


**=/=**   
  


Ahead of them, Severus Snape was stationary, the sound of the Headmaster and Hermione Granger's laughter carrying down towards him, down where he stood in the shadow of the Forbidden Forest. He thought the two certainly cast a sickeningly endearing figure: Dumbledore's arm thrown around the girl's shoulders, their heads bent together, laughing more raucous than anyone had nerve to on a day like today. Above the thunder cackled, and below these two were giving it a run for its money.

He thought, considering their relative _cosiness_ , 'She'll be initiated into the Order soon enough.'

Severus quirked a brow at the old man when he came a little closer, folded his arms close to his chest at the clatter of thunder, the fork of silver cutting the horizon. 'We were just saying,' said Dumbledore, 'how you're rather comparable to a hippogriff, Severus.'

His eyes cut to the girl, and her cheeks grew pink under his study. 'Oh!' the girl gasped, turning to the Headmaster. 'I don't think that's fair, Professor. I-I . . . I . . . It wasn't me who suggested it.'

'Indeed . . . ?' he asked, watching how her bony hands tugged at the strap of her bag as if she was trying to root herself into the earth. She rocked on her heels. 'Though,' he said, 'this does ring entirely of your sense of humour.' Severus looked to Dumbledore now, and the old man was grinning widely, though somewhat like a child caught shovelling his peas into a napkin. 'Are we to spend the afternoon engaging in more appallingly inaccurate metaphors, or haven't we homes to return to?'

'Quite right,' said Dumbledore nodding, and then turning to the girl. He rested his frail-looking hands on her shoulders and leaned down so they were eye-to-eye. The entire thing looking far too homely and comfortable, in his opinion, for a Headmaster and his second-favourite Gryffindor – he supposed that the miscreant Potter received kisses upon the forehead. 'Good luck,' he said to Granger, and then more whispers lost to the clap of thunder above.

She nodded furiously, however, and then looked to Severus. 'I will. I will. Of course. Thank you, Professor Dumbledore.'

Severus cleared his throat, and with a sharp tilt of his head, gestured for the girl to come nearer. 'Miss Granger,' he said, as she grew closer, 'is this to be your first disapparition?'

Dumbledore, behind the girl, nodded to him. He saw the Professor's knotty wand drop down his wide right sleeve and into his hand, and almost as soon as the Headmaster had gotten a firm grip on the handle, he was gone; Miss Granger appeared to mistake the pop of his disapparition as just another trick of the weather, and he felt his lips grow thin in disapproval.

'Yes,' she said. 'This is my first time . . . I hear it's awful.'

He rolled his eyes. 'One gets used to it,' he said, and then wondered for a moment when he had gotten into the business of meaningless prosaicisms – least of all offering them to Gryffindor swots. 'Side-Along—the method you'll be employing today—never gets any better.' 'Damnit! Again,' he thought, 'why am I bothering?'

Ever since finding out the Headmaster's grand plan—divulged when Sirius Black had made a miraculous escape from the Hogwarts' grounds—Severus had been thinking on how he would endure the girl over the summer. The fact that the old man had entrusted such a vital task to her was initially beyond even his comprehension – why her, a mere adolescent, than a seasoned member of the Order? And then, as the Headmaster revealed that she was in the possession of a Ministry-authorised Time-Turner, the matter was elucidated—and far more than just that. Severus was no fool; he expected that the Ministry had granted her permission to use the device at the very beginning of her third year, and after a brief search in the School administration records, he'd discovered that she received an Outstanding in every subject bar Divination, subjects that were, curiously enough, timetabled one on top of the other. The Headmaster's Gryffindor bias apparently knew no bounds. Sirius' miraculous escape, also, less divine intervention, and more a little toying with time. When confronted with this accusation—that Hermione had been in possession of the Time-Turner for much longer than he was told, and had used it to free Black—the Headmaster offered neither a confirmation nor denial. Though, again, Severus was intelligent enough to know that this was more than mere Gryffindor favouritism or heroic theatrics, however much it pained him to admit. The muggleborn Hermione Granger was essential to the Dark Lord's defeat – more than Potter himself, he'd wager, not least given her recent elevated status. If she'd used the blasted thing to fiddle with her grades a little, more power to her.

Severus, however, was absolutely salivating at the thought of the chit's guilt—oh, how she would be eaten alive by it! 'How long,' he thought, 'will she wait, before exposing herself?' He would give her perhaps until the end of the day before she announced quite how long she'd been in possession of the Time-Turner, and then— _dear Merlin._ Perhaps the entertainment factor would be worth all infringements on his privacy; he almost scoffed aloud at the thought.

Severus Snape's privacy had long been infringed upon – in fact, was there ever a time in his life where he kept his own confidence? In childhood it was his father, who in bouts of alcohol-induced paranoia, would beat the secrets out of the boy; then Lily Evans, who with her innocent wiles, would coax the truth from his lips; after losing her, the various Death Eaters preying upon those of lesser rank – the half-blood Severus, oh so desperate to prove himself; the Dark Lord's legilimency, an inescapable trap—nothing sacred, nothing hidden; and since his fall, there was Dumbledore, with his boundless love and empathy, a different sort of suffering altogether.

Looking down at the girl—beside him, she watched with glee unchecked as the lightning splintered the sky—and he almost pitied her naivety. 'Was she aware' he thought, 'of just how much she'll lose when entering the fold?' He shook himself out of those spiralling thoughts almost immediately; there were more pressing matters at hand.

Disapparating. Now, he knew the Headmaster preferred a mere touching of the wrists, but he wasn't confident enough in Granger's self-preservation skills; she would, no doubt, impulsively let go mid-apparition, and he'd be picking up pieces of her from here to Spinner's End, his family home situated on the outskirts of Manchester. And lifting her into his arms like some child was definitely not an option – so Severus had settled on an alternative, one that he'd been ruminating over for the better part of this morning.

'Come here,' he said. From his cloak, he pulled out a sweet-smelling antiemetic potion, which she took and downed without hesitation. He frowned once again in disapproval.

'It's okay, Professor,' she said, amused at his irritation. 'I'm certain you're not trying to poison me . . . and I know a non-vomitus potion by sight.' And then she looked pensive, but he was rather more concerned with the sudden warmth in his cheeks: she was uncommonly quick for a Hogwarts' student, and now imbued with the good regard of the Headmaster. Treating her like an ordinary student was going to be difficult, but he would try nonetheless; preferential treatment was only reserved for the children of Death Eaters, and some of his more studious Slytherins, anybody else was hardly worth the effort.

'Miss Granger,' he said, 'as this is your first time, I would like to take every precaution. So, in a moment I will be casting a freezing charm, and—'

' _Excuse me_?'

'—it shall ensure you turn up in one piece, Miss Granger!'

'But sir,' she insisted, 'that's . . . so _extreme_.'

'Girl,' he hissed, 'why are you making this so difficult?' 'Of course,' he thought, shaking his head at her. 'Of course, she'd make me regret this instantly.'

'There has to be an alternative!'

'The alternative is something aside from the _petrificus totalus_ I intened, perhaps an _immobulus_ – is that more to your liking?'

She huffed and crossed her arms. 'I refuse to be worked upon by your wand, Professor. This is unnecessarily cruel.'

He barked out a short laugh. 'Worked upon by my wand?' he thought. 'I must write that down if only to remind her of such stupidity in the years to come. Cruel indeed.' 'And what is your alternative,' he asked. 'You, Miss Granger, who know nothing at all of—'

'Well, that is simply untrue, Professor!' she cried, surprising him with her furious air. 'I have _obviously_ researched apparition!' _Obviously_. 'All I need is to take your arm firmly and not let go.'

'Then take it!' he hissed, at his wit's end. She hooked her right arm through the crook of his left, her hand curling up and taking a firm hold his bicep; her body angled much too close to him than he would have preferred, and he noticed how boyish and bony and frail she was. 'Mark my words,' he said to her, 'should you let go between here and Manchester, I will categorically refuse to find and fetch and bind all the paltry pieces of your Gryffindor hind.'

Her eyes, the colour of tree sap, were wide. 'Yes, Professor Snape,' she said, her jaw tight, and her cheeks ruddy. 'I won't let go.'

He sighed, and began clearing his mind of everything bar Spinner's End—he could not think any longer on the girl, nor her too-loud breathing, nor the fact that she would be his ward for the summer, not even that the Dark Lord's return was imminent. He retrieved his wand—13 ¾ inches, a dark yew with a phoenix feather core, utterly rigid—from the sleeve Miss Granger had taken a hold of. With Spinner's End resolutely in his mind, Severus Snape disapparated.


	4. Home & Hearth

* * *

**CHAPTER FOUR**

**HOME & HEARTH**

* * *

  
When Severus and Hermione landed in dark narrow alley behind a row of three-storey terraced houses in Spinner's End, Hermione's grip loosened and she sank to her knees, dry-heaving over the uneven concrete slabs, orange with lichen. And Severus found himself frowning once more; the anti-vomitus potion either hadn't enough time to work on her system (highly unlikely, as he'd brewed potion himself the evening before, and had ensured its amplified potency and immediate effect), or she'd been fostering a weakened constitution, devoid of some of the nutrients the potion was supposed to work with, despite—and perhaps because of—all her dalliances with Time; he'd wager a year's pay on the latter. As the rain perpetually fell in Manchester, whatever the season, when she rose her palms were imbedded with pebbles, caked in watery mud. Severus watched her wiping her mouth of bile with a grimace, right herself, and then freeze at her surroundings.

'Welcome,' he said, looking up and down the deserted alley dotted with recycling bins and stray packets of crisps, 'to Spinner's End.'

'Which one is yours?' she asked, looking to each identical rear gate, wondering which one they were to enter.

'Ah . . .' He reached into the inside pocket of his robes and pulled out a scrap of crumpled parchment. It read:

_Master of Potions Professor Severus Tobias Snape lives at_   
_72 Spinner's End, Oldham, Greater Manchester, England._

'Your home is under a Fidelius?' she asked, mouth agape. And she stared at the words, moving her chapped lips as she read, and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, wordlessly handing the parchment back to Snape. The message curled into ash as it met the tip of his wand.

Hermione raised her head, and no sooner as she'd done so, between two slats of wood another spoke emerged, and another, then the entire ten-foot high gate, where in his youth he'd scratched in his door number with a beer bottle cap—behind that, the Snape home enfolded out from between number 70 and 74.

Since the early nineteenth century, the Snapes had earned their paltry living by working in the cotton mills, the town being the epicentre of textile production for most of the nineteenth and twentieth century. And Spinner's End was perpetually in the shadow of three 300-foot spires: defunct red-brick chimneys he'd spent a childhood investigating. On either side of the garden were eight-foot-high wooden fences he'd spent an afternoon last summer painting a forest green, and the back, behind the alley, an exterior wall of a disused cotton mill. All of this, for Severus, was home, but he suspected that it would be rather claustrophobic for the girl after spending the school year gallivanting around the school grounds, sneaking into every forbidden nook and cranny.

He slid the bolt on the fence and gestured for her to step through, onto the lawn. 'The Fidelius is a recent development,' he said. 'When considering where to place Harry Potter's closest confidant'—she shifted on her feet, sighed, and he found her belligerence did not infuriate him as it had done earlier—'the Headmaster and I trawled through every conceivable scenario, every damnable location, where you'd be protected. Eventually, we applied Occam's razor and arrived at this conclusion. This was the simplest option, less taken for granted, fewer assumptions, minimal risk.'

By the expression on her peaky face, and her general know-it-all tendencies, Severus understood she'd half a dozen questions, and pre-empting them all would be an exercise in madness, so he suffered the moment it took her to verbalise her thoughts. Eventually, she spewed a slurry, and he was relieved that he did not have to explain the further workings of the Fidelius charm – he'd be here a fortnight. 'Who are the other secret keepers?' she asked.

'There are none,' he said.

'Not Dumbledore?'

'Not Dumbledore.'

'The School and Ministry records?'

'Revised.'

'To?'

'Hogwarts.'

'Gringotts?'

'Informed.'

'Your neighbours?'

'Ignorant.'

And then, a brief hesitation, a look of understanding, and she said with more certainty than he expected, 'The Fidelius will cloak all my _foolish wand-waving_.'

He pressed his fingertips to his lips, fought the upturning of his lips. 'Indeed, Miss Granger. Though, that particular benefit is not widely known . . . How is it that you've inferred it? Knowledge of the charm exists only between a select group of witches and wizards.'

'I did not infer it. I researched it,' she said, haughty, and the deduction of points was almost on his lips. 'After discovering the events that led to the Potters' deaths'—Severus winced, unable to control the impulse, though the Granger girl looked too caught up in her self-vindication to notice how he'd almost been winded by the mention of _her_ death—'I looked through positively every book in the Hogwarts library to find it, and realised that I had come across the charm before.'

'Oh?' he said, curious. To his knowledge only two copies existed of the rare and singular text on the Fidelius: the one Restricted Section, and the one that he'd borrowed from Dumbledore, gathering dust in his personal library here at Spinner's End, unread.

Her eyes widened comically. 'Yes. In a book by Belladonna Dumbledore.' Her voice grew to almost a whisper, looking even paler than before, her hands working up and down the strap of her bag. 'An entire section on the construction and uses of the Fidelius—perhaps, it's why Professor Dumbledore is so partial to it, given she's an ancestor. Though, the charm was constructed by Belladonna as a means of necromancy, of course. The chapter concluded by detailing a barbaric ritual: galvanising the dead to reveal their secret-kept location. Not long enough to sustain them, of course, but necromancy, nonetheless.'

' _The Nightshade Guide_ , no?' he asked. 'I have it . . . though it remains unread. And she, Belladonna, speaks on the use of underage magic?'

She looked thoughtful, head tilted to one side. 'Fleetingly. She describes the Fidelius as . . . Death's veil, though I think purgatory is more fitting.'

'Metaphor,' he scoffed.

'Yes, Professor. Nothing—not magic, not fragrance, nor vision—violates its bounds, the magic contained within the secret-kept location is, well, absolutely secret . . . Though enough magic inhibited to a particular location, the magic looks for an out, pumps into the earth, forms and feeds ley lines.' Together, the two gazed at the lush lawn, dotted with flowers of clover; their eyes darting to a single magpie flying over the gardens, coming to perch on the fence that separated the Snape garden from the one next door. It stared across, and it daren't move to traverse the lawn. 'Or so Belladonna theorises,' she added, watching the magpie shuffle on the fence. 'My understanding of ley theory is rather elementary, Professor.'

Snape's gaze had shifted from the magpie, back to the girl. She looked as tense as she always did, watching him, perhaps waiting for his reprimand, or some ridiculing. 'You will have opportunities to fix that,' he said, instead. 'I would consider this _visit_ as an educational residency, and the Headmaster and I your patrons.'

'I really do appreciate that, Sir . . .' She pressed a palm to her mouth, cleared her throat, and then turned around in a tight circle to see all the sights. 'It must be rather difficult returning here,' she said, wistful, perhaps for home.

He scoffed, a little more performative than he'd planned. 'Hardly, Granger. It's my home.'

'Yes,' she said. 'But that's not exactly what I mean.'

'And what _exactly_ do you mean?'

She smiled, and tugged a wayward strand of hair back into her low bun, and gestured to the abundance of warm-toned brick. 'Gryffindor colours,' she said, with a shrug.

  
**=/=**   
  


Hermione's mother, Jean, always said, 'You can judge an entire family on the state of their back lawn.'

Professor Snape's lawn was ankle-high, dotted with fibrous flowers, and so much clover. The two stood at the back of the yard, under the dappled shade of a tall silver birch—the tree had learned to grow high and wide, the tallest branches flush against the auburn bricks of the mill, a hunchbacked thing, reaching out towards the home. There was wrought iron patio furniture further up—a narrow table and four heavy chairs—the wooden slats looking riddled with rot from even her place here, twenty feet away, the iron slicked with green paint but it had long since peeled; they sat in front of the large patio doors, which stretched across the entire back of the house, the glass covered by dark drapes and reflecting the green of the garden. Hermione wondered what her mother would make of the Snapes, with their brilliant white PVC windows, boxed in on all sides.

'Am I,' he said, crossing his arms, 'to expect a constant cycle of lecturers and small-talk?'

'Inevitably,' she said. 'We'd go crazy otherwise!'

'Speak for yourself, Granger.' And he walked up the garden, head down, taking long strides and mumbling to himself, walking with such familiarity over the lawn that he'd deftly dodge clods of raised ground. Hermione jogged to keep up, and then slowed down after a second wave of nausea hit her so hard, her knees buckled. Down she went again, vaguely aware of the Professor exclaiming, 'What now?!' when he heard the guttural sound of her gagging. Hermione felt like something had her stomach in a vice grip, and was slowly ringing out the acid. She pressed a fist to her mouth, eyes screwed shut, though was vaguely aware from the sudden heat coming from her left side that Snape crouched beside her. 'What have you done to yourself?' he demanded.

'Nothing!' she hissed between her teeth.

'I am warning you, Granger . . . I am not going to tolerate untruths.'

She looked at him through the tears in her eyes and shook her head. 'It's fine . . . it's private, Professor.'

The man looked suddenly murderous, nostrils flared and breathing sharply, brows drawn into dark furrows. 'Are you . . . Miss Granger, please tell me you're not so idiotic as to get yourself _pregnant_?'

And despite nausea, she couldn't help the hysteria that followed. _Pregnant_? 'Dear God,' she thought. 'He thinks I'm pregnant?' Laughing, her hands balled into fists and pressed into her stomach, she felt almost of a ghost of a touch on her back, a 'Miss Granger?' full of trepidation, or, if she was actually as delirious as she felt, concern. And increasingly, she the laughter crept closer and closer to sobs; within a moment, there she was, bawling her eyes out in front of the fearsome and foolish Professor.

'You must get up,' he said, and _there_ , he was definitely rubbing a hand up and down her back as if he were consoling some fickle First-Year snake. 'We should get inside, out of the rain . . . or is it St Mungo's you need?'

She composed herself as much as she could, fishing a tissue from her robes, and swiping at her nose and cheeks. 'I told you, Professor, I'm fine. And I'm definitely not pregnant. I'm fine. Fine.'

'Evidently!' he seethed under his breath, rising to his feet smoothly, and wringing his hands.

'I'm sorry,' she said, at her feet. 'It won't happen again.' She brushed the mud and grass and clover from her knees and robes, and made her way up the garden, not waiting to follow the Potions Master, or check to see if he were following her. But she could feel his eyes on her the whole time, hear the whisper of his robes as he moved, the rustle of his boots against the mulch.

In silence, but somewhat absentmindedly, she watched Snape open up what looked like a ward matrix on the patio doors – it glowed a pearlescent white, layers of mandalas, dotted with hex runes and arithmancy equations. He pressed the tip of his wand to the centre, and said, 'Come on, Granger. Right in the centre.' And she fished her vine wand from her robe pocket, and followed suit—a thrum of hot magic engulfed her brain, as if her crown had been struck by lightning, and it took all her effort to keep a hold of her wand and keep it steady.

'You could have warned me, Sir.'

He huffed but made no comment, and instead chanted a spell in Latin. When he finished the matrix dissolved, and the door clicked open. He pushed up a bolt, and just as his hand closed on the handle, about to slide the whole panel to the left, he stopped and turned on her, looking down his nose at Hermione.

'Since,' he said, 'it's strictly forbidden by the Ministry to have underage wizards and witches sign magically binding contracts, and since it is the height of idiocy to engage in oaths and vows with feckless Gryffindors—not least those possessed with such contempt for school rules and spend untold hours with Dark books—I will have to take you at your worthless word, Miss Granger.' And then, he stared at her for a long moment, his dark eyes flickering between both of hers, sparking with contempt.

'Perhaps a blood pact?' she said, a smile tugging at her lips. 'If my word means so little.'

There was a lightness in his expression. Nonetheless, 'Do not tempt me,' he reproached. 'I will have your word, that whatever happens in this house, _whatever_ you discover, it goes no further than myself and the Headmaster – and the latter only if you must'—she nodded quickly—'I . . . I am not used to living with anybody, least of all a schoolgirl . . .' He grimaced and turned back towards the door. 'Am I making myself clear, Miss Granger?'

She nodded, and then realised the futility. 'Yes, Sir. The Headmaster told as much to me too.'

'Fine.' He tugged open the door, wide enough to walk through comfortably, and disappeared behind the heavy blackout curtains. 'Mind how you step.'

* * *

In bouts of homesickness, Ron had described every inch of his own house, from the creaky front door to the garage where his father, Arthur, collected muggle knickknacks and artifacts. It always served as a fascinating and educational lecture for both herself, the muggleborn, and Harry, muggleborn in all but blood. His stories would often feature that clock in their kitchen, where Fred and George would often flicker between "mortal peril" and some utterly mundane destination like "dentist". It apparently was a house where the dishes washed themselves with a flick of the wand, rooms existed without bounds, and clever spellwork ensured that only specific siblings could enter rooms at any given time.

So, Hermione had been expecting a level of wizardry in the innards of the Snape home but was initially surprised to find it entirely barren of the hijinks and ease-of-living she had thought. Everything so still, so stagnant.

The room she'd entered was a modest lounge, each corner dotted with beaten armchairs and rickety end-tables, tucked into nooks lined with shelves, and upon the shelves books, and the books were all hardback and clothbound, not a speck of dust to be seen (evidence of _some_ wandwork, she expected), the floor the original wooden slats. Out through the lounge, a small hallway. In front, a narrow door through which there were stairs going down to the potions laboratory in the cellar—she was reluctantly allowed to enter if she absolutely must. To her right, a long and functional kitchen with Formica countertops, linoleum floors, and an olive-green fridge-freezer—Snape would be taking care of breakfast and dinner, but she'd have to make her way otherwise, the only logical way considering they were at the whim of their own internal clocks. To her left the front room with a navy carpet so thick her feet sank into it, a set of forest green chesterfield sofas, and in the corner a cabinet cluttered with empty crystal decanters, photo frames that held unmoving pictures of the dark-haired Snapes—from her place in the doorway, she could not make out their faces at all, and given how quickly the professor had shut the door she expected she would never learn. 'Just for taking company,' he'd said.

And then he'd lead her upstairs to the cramped first-floor landing, where they stood for a moment facing three doors with peeling paint spaced well-apart, a second set of stairs curving behind them.

'Your bedroom, the communal bathroom, and my room,' said Snape, gesturing to each the dark wood doors, in turn. 'No rooms are warded against you now, but I'd rather you stay out of my bedroom . . . _obviously_.'

'Yes, of course,' she'd said. 'I think . . . I think I would appreciate some privacy too.'

He had nodded once, and then turned towards the stairs. 'The library you were promised is upstairs,' said Snape, and then tilted his head in that direction, and up they went another steep flight of stairs, at the top of which was a heavily bolted door. As he did before entering the house, to her bemusement, Snape opened up a ward matrix and engaged in what she recognised as some intricate and _utterly beautiful_ wand verification test. A slim wisp of burgundy magic dialling the runes like an old muggle rotary telephone. 'If you would . . .' he said. 'Trace every third rune anti-clockwise, thrice, and then hold your wand at the centre until the matrix dissolves entirely. No incantations necessary.'

This time around, the magic was less the painful spark of electricity, but more like she'd been sipping her father's beef bone broth which he brewed when she was particularly poorly; it brought the balminess of cayenne to her throat, singed her tongue, warmed her blood. The magic, as she completed the first rune, settled below her navel, and she shot a look to the Potions Master who had eyes trained upon her wand. Given all those hours of Adjustment, her Charms reading was advanced enough, and she understood that wherever the magic settled was vitally important to the construction and the fundamental nature of the wards. Earlier, when she'd been permitted entry, the electricity had whizzed only around her brain—her identity, her thoughts, her consciousness—and she'd read that such wards signified that the home had been keyed into an awareness of her magical signature. Now, with this warmth taking a foothold in her womb, the warding was rather more concerned with her bodily signature, her baser intentions, her morality, her drive. And with the intensity of this feeling, the convolution of the spellwork, she didn't have to look up in a textbook to know where on the spectrum of permissible magics the ward was placed. 'Is this the first of his secrets I'm expected to keep?' she thought.

As she lowered her wrist to her side, she looked to him, brows raised. 'Dark?' she asked, her abdominal muscles tight, her face warm.

He gave her a levelling stare. 'Frankly, the most potent wards are,' he said, and then, after a moment of hesitation: 'It bodes well, Miss Granger, that you're so attuned to your magic . . . No one but you and I'—her mouth went dry, ears hot—'are permitted in this room, and this warding will release a cascade of curses for anyone who forces entry. For that reason, should anything untoward happen during your stay, and you need to seek refuge, this is where you come, this is where I should expect to find you.'

She grinned, thoughts turning dark. 'And you'll survive if only to allow me to leave the room?'

His eyes narrowed. 'Please refrain from flirting with me, Miss Granger. I am not—'

'Professor! That is not—'

'—one of your—'

'—what I meant at all!'

'Gryffindor _mates_.'

Unblinking, they stared at one another. Snape breathed heavy; Hermione not at all. ' _Flirting with him_?' she thought, incensed. ' _Flirting_? _With Professor Snape_?' But Hermione attempted to sift through her memories, tried to identify one instance where she'd employed some churlish wiles in conversation with any male, let alone the standoffish and terrifying Professor Snape. 'How does one even flirt?' she thought. 'How bizarre! As if I'm some Lavender-esque tart!' She said, 'I think the summer will be a learning experience.'

'Oh really?' he scoffed. 'Pray, tell me, Granger, what do _you presume_ to teach _me_?'

'Something of my character, I hope,' she said.

'And this charge of flirting with me is a slight against that character, I take it?'

She nodded, resolute. 'I have never flirted,' she said, and then wondered whether all their defining conversations would take place in these liminal spaces. 'I have no reason to,' she added, 'not in these circumstances, least of all with you . . . _Professor_.'

'Quite. Yes.'

At that word, Snape ran the tip of his wand over the array of locks and swung open the door to his library.

Considering the rather banal tastes displayed in the downstairs rooms—though she hadn't a clue to what degree of opulence Professor Snape had decorated the bedrooms—she had been expecting much of the same here: functional, beige, a little hackneyed.

The room took the entire slim rectangular footprint of the Snape house, with double-height ceilings, and a maze of slim wooden gangways ringing the upper level; it was evidence of rather resilient magic wound into the structure because from the outside the property was only three-stories high, topped with a dark slate roof. Professor Snape, perhaps in some nostalgia or sentimentality, had enchanted the ceiling of the library much like the Great Hall: as they walked in, it showed the thundery skies of Scotland, light filtering through the clouds, lightning crackling. The floor was covered with an array of Persian rugs, in deep greens and blues, even something backed in a Gryffindor red ran along the far wall on her left side. Ebony ladders and bookshelves lined every square inch of wall, though they were protected from the dust with glass—well, except the wall on the easterly side; there sat a great wood-burning hearth, the brick chimney extending to the full height of the ceiling, dotted with Academic paintings, pencil studies of magical creatures, and a single tapestry. Plush high-back armchairs and sofas sat in front of the hearth, upholstered with olive-green and mustard velvet. In the centre of the room, a tessellation of desks polished with a dark stain, cluttered with books and paperweights, a veritable fortune in loose parchment, feathers, and ink wells. 'I,' she thought, 'would dabble in the Dark Arts too, if only to protect this.'

But Hermione gravitated over to the fireplace, away from the books. As she walked over, she felt Snape fall in-step beside her. She stopped behind the sofa, looking up at the aged tapestry that hung immediately above the wide, ornate marble mantel. Blindly, she opened her satchel and held a hand over the dark space. ' _Accio Paradise Lost,_ ' she said.

The medium-sized Penguin Classics paperback flew into her hand, and she looked down at the cover; it depicted the naked Eve, centred, plucking what looked to be a green apple or a pear or a lemon, coiled on the opposite side of the tree was Satan the serpent, jaw unlatched, his eyes level with her barely-there breasts; a bird which looked rather like a phoenix watched in the foreground. The tapestry that hung in the Snape library, of Flemish origin, was undoubtedly the original. It showed the wider scene: the foreground of the right side, illustrating the naked Adam, lunging for the forbidden fruit—a second Eve holding one out for him to take with her right hand, her left coiled another close to her breast. A lion slumbered at Adam's feet.

Hermione handed the book to Snape. 'Look at the copyright page,' she said. And he did for a long moment, and then shot his eyes back at her, the pupils wide, the open book trembling in his hands. She tugged her Time-Turner out from her under her shirt and cradled it in her hands. 'There is more to Time than _this_ ,' said Hermione.

She took the book from his hands, and clutched it to her chest: that Penguin Classics version of Milton's _Paradise Lost_ was first published in the year 2000, six years in the future.


	5. Books

* * *

_  
We must not look at goblin men,  
_ _We must not buy their fruits:  
_ _Who knows upon what soil they fed  
_ _Their hungry thirsty roots?_

— Christina Rossetti, 'Goblin Market' _  
  
_

* * *

**CHAPTER FIVE**

**BOOKS**

* * *

  
For most part of that afternoon, Snape and Hermione sat together on the sofa in front of the unlit hearth, heads craned up, eyes unblinking. 'What do you need?' he had asked her, after some silence. 'I don't know yet,' she'd replied. 'Draw up a list,' he advised. 'I'm not fond of lists,' she replied, 'they can be lost, they can be found.' And then, 'What do you think I should do?' she asked, and, 'Nothing,' he said. Back and forth in their anxious trivialities. 'Dinner?' 'Later.' 'Not now?' 'Later.' 'What do you fancy, Professor?' 'Silence, Miss Granger. I fancy silence.' 'Sure . . . Professor?' 'Yes, Miss Granger?' 'Would you call me Hermione?' 'I have considered it.' 'Professor Dumbledore does.' 'Yes, I noticed.' 'And?' 'And, what?' 'Will you?' 'Unlikely.'

So, she silenced herself, and continued her study of the tapestry, looking for clues in the warp and weft. _Paradise Lost_ sat closed and snug between their thighs, the spine touching Hermione, the yellowed pages against Snape's trouser leg—they had removed and hung up their outer robes upon entering the house, and Hermione had worked hard to maintain a balance between that Gryffindor overfamiliarity and their lukewarm (and distinctly platonic) intimacy. Asking him to call her by her given name was merely a rung on the ladder, sitting beside him on the sofa, another rung.

Overhead, the setting sun warmed the charmed sky, and it was then Hermione realised that they'd sat in their jilted silence staring at the tapestry for some six hours. And all that time, the movement of it against her skin and mind had felt like she'd been standing in a light drizzle of rain – this sensitivity to time had settled into her consciousness after using the Time-Turner for just a couple of weeks.

Back in September, after spending three nights of Adjustment hidden in the Restricted Section, Hermione had found the right spell to translate one of the oldest surviving texts on time magic: _We Moirae and Our Loom_. It was written in a rare strain of ancient Greek, and though, of course, translations of the text existed, and were readily available in the Restricted Section, places just beside the original text, she'd felt an innate suspicion of any witch or wizard who'd devoted time to writing and publishing a translation of work when such translation spells existed.

In some wizarding circles, ornate reproductions of the text were forbidden to touch the ground, held in homes and libraries on the topmost shelves—Hermione was relieved for that handy first-year levitation spell that brought down the leather-bound tome safely. Of all the books in the library, this had been the sole one slotted into a protective dragonhide sleeve _and_ wrapped in silvery velvet, with more than a dozen protective spells laced into the fabric. And since that day she had read the book, cover to cover, thrice.

It detailed the lives and philosophies of three muggleborn witches, the Moirae themselves: Atropos, Lachesis, and Clotho, identical triplets. Whether it was the sisters mythologising their own beginnings, Hermione couldn't be sure, but apparently their magic had manifested _in utero_ , slain their mother in the seventh month of gestation. Their loom-worker mother had borne them at the age of twelve after she'd been raped in broad daylight by their elderly father, incensed by the sight of the young girl elbow-deep in purple dye.

'Our birth was sinful,' they'd began on that very first page, 'our lives recompense.' Staring at the tapestry—the phallic serpent, the youthful Eve—Hermione wondered whether the sisters were, in part, responsible for the kind of rhetoric the Abrahamic faiths clung. How much had the world lost because of these sinful births? 

But rather more importantly to Hermione's musings, _We Moirae and Our Loom_ was _the_ seminal text on the philosophy of Time. Each sister's magic represented a component of fate: Clotho, with her distaff and spindle, dual wands of grape-vine wood, she channelled her innate magic and spun the thread of life for every being; Lachesis, with her foot-long wand, measured the thread; and Atropos, with her shears—a two-pronged wand with both a unicorn-hair and thestral-heartstring core—chose the manner of death, and snipped the thread of life. And like any common thread, though there was a definite beginning and end to one's life, time could still loop on itself, form a knot, grow frayed at the edges.

Hermione recalled herself insisting to Dumbledore that any time traveller was bound to the closed-loop theory, and all her lived evidence supported it. The Moirae insisted the thread of one's fate conformed to the manipulations of Time – this, to her scorn, was often misinterpreted, or mistranslated, or muddled entirely.

One’s fate and one’s time were not interchangeable terms; the arithmanthic equations at the heart of the Ministry-issued Time-Turners supposed that they were synonymous, not accounting for the nuance or the complexity – rather strange, considering the meticulous nature of what they were attempting to accomplish.

Dumbledore, eyes twinkling with mischief, had handed her his copy of _The Time-Turner Trials of the Twentieth Century_ , a text penned by the Unspeakable faction who had created the Time-Turners in use today, detailing in fine detail the tribulations and conclusions and findings of the Time-Turner creation process – 'Being Supreme Mugwump Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore has its privileges,' he'd said.

This was the problem, and Hermione had been aware of it since her first reading of the Moirae text back in the autumn; and given that _Paradise Lost_ was published six years in the future, it was just fact that she'd have the real Time-Turner in her hands soon enough.

Eventually, Snape snapped her out of her thoughts. 'How did you procure the book?' he asked.

'I found it under my pillow in September,' she said, looking down to where the book lay, watching Snape drum his fingers on the cover. 'The Headmaster and Professor McGonagall had just bequeathed me the Time-Turner'—it still lay on show, over her shirt, the sand glued to the bottom chamber—'and when I returned to the dormitory that evening . . . The first time I went back, it was to stake out the girls' dormitory to see if anyone had left it, but nothing. It appeared _as if by magic_ only when I set my head on the pillow.'

She looked up and saw him glaring. 'How long did you turn?' he asked.

'Well . . . five hours,' she said, a little hesitant.

He hissed. 'Foolish girl!'

'I know . . . The professors did warn me to take it easy but—'

'You could have died!' Hermione jumped in her seat at his sudden increase in volume. 'Did they not explain?' he asked. 'Half turns, Miss Granger. Half turns. Work up a resistance. The complete turns if you must. Men and women have lost their minds on quarter-turns! _Five complete turns_! Such barefaced idiocy!'

She smiled a little wanly. 'I quickly got used to it.’

'How used to it?' he probed, eyes turned slits, his fingers drumming over the cover louder, quicker. She was startled at how quickly it had come to this conversation; Professor Dumbledore had warned her that Snape would not act kindly should he discover the truth of her Turning, but she knew that even the Headmaster was blind to just how much she'd aged. But in the interest of maintaining some honesty with the man, and in an effort to climb another rung, she settled on disclosing the truth. He watched, a little crazed, as she deliberated the phrasing. 'Out with it!' he said.

She sighed, bringing the book out from under his grasp, and holding it to her chest; he drummed his thigh now. 'The schedules and workloads meant that by the end of the first week I'd taken to turning back _at least_ ten hours every day.'

He winced. 'Fucking hell.' She gaped a little at his foul mouth. 'Was this another rung?' she thought. His eyes grew a little wide too, then softened into an unspoken apology. 'You turned,' he said, clearing his throat, 'ten hours every day?'

'At least,' she said, and then thought back to all those times she'd pushed herself, toyed with the sickness, and found herself more than twenty-five hours in the past, for nothing but to turn in a perfected copy of Snape's homework, which he'd mark within the day. And how often had she Turned more? How often had she spent a week camping out in the Fiasco Room, existing on meal-replenishing potions? 'Sometimes,' she said, 'I Turned for nothing but to read by the Black Lake before dawn.'

He tutted, shook his head, crossed his arms, watched her. 'What of your age?' he asked. 'Have you calculated it?'

She nodded. 'About a year.'

He coughed, and choked out, 'A _year_?'

'I shall be turning sixteen any day now.'

He regarded her carefully. 'You should be studied,' he said, his voice belying nothing. 'You should be dissected in the Department of Mysteries. This is a gross mi—'

'I know,' she said, interrupting him. 'I know.'

He heaved himself to his feet and pulled out his wand from his cuff. Silently, he touched the tip of the wand to her forehead, and then flicked up, murmuring an incantation under his breath—as she had done almost every day since September. A ghostly figure materialised to her left, made of pearlescent silver magic, her eyes wide and unblinking and white, all white. Hermione stood next to the man, watching the diagnostic spectre. With his wand, he tapped the figure's head, and the cranium split in two, the skull and hair and skin winding to the back of her head like a Venetian blind.

He sucked in a breath through his teeth. ' _Merlin_. You see, all of this . . . your brain, the entire damnable thing should be glowing a salubrious and _safe_ white, but yours . . .' It wasn't white, far from it. The thing, her brain, was lit up by dim patches of yellow and lime, entire chunks of blue and lavender; thoughts buzzed between regions in a greyish spark—this, she knew, was yet more evidence that the Ministry Time-Turner's were poorly made; in magical engineering there were no unintended side-effects: with arithmancy, every variable known and considered. 'You're _bruised_ ,' he said. 'You have hurt yourself . . . and the damage may be irreversible.'

' _Finite incantatem_ ,' she said, jabbing her wand at this shadow. 'Professor,' said Hermione, 'I am well-aware. I perform the diagnostics regularly myself. I am keeping track of the magical malnourishment.'

'And yet,' he seethed, 'you continue.'

'Because I must . . . And I was ready to give it up,' she said, tears hot in her eyes. 'I was ready, and then Professor Dumbledore . . .'

'Yes,' he said, shoving his wand back up his sleeve, and staring into her glassy eyes. 'I will be having words with the old fool. This is the very height of irresponsibility, _you silly little girl_.'

She threw herself back onto the sofa and shot sparks pass Snape's leg, and into the fire. He did not jump aside like she'd expected (or hoped), like Harry and Ron often did when she lit the fireplace in the Gryffindor common room sometimes, too close to their bodies for comfort. Snape just watched her, arms crossed, brows drawn and casting dark shadows over his deep-set eyes. His black hair hung limp, parted in the very centre of his forehead, framing his face in a haphazard layered cut, as if he'd taken shears to it himself; the thought made Hermione smile, which apparently was enough for the austere man to break out of his reflexion.

'Dinner,' he said. 'Downstairs. I'll call for you when it's done.' He turned and walked towards the door, making it clear enough that Hermione should stay here in the meantime.

'Professor! What are we having?' she asked, suddenly dreading the thought of being alone in this unfamiliar room. 'Shall I get changed? Do I have time?'

He stopped at the door, and turned to her, looking as unimpressed with her badgering as she'd supposed he would. And then, in a gesture that was so unlike the man, he began to rub wearily at his eyes for some time; he pressed the palms of both hands to his face, and scrubbed, and worked at the muscles. 'You have more time than most would, Miss Granger,' he mumbled, speaking through the aperture between his hands. A laugh, unbidden, burst through Hermione's lips, and she was glad that Snape was no longer sat beside her or she may have sprayed him with a little spittle. 'We are having whatever I can think of between now and when I get to the kitchen. Do with your attire what you wish; this is hardly a household where we don dress robes for dinner.'

She nodded. 'Would you like some help?'

He dropped his hands, shoulders rolling back, resuming is statuesque posture. 'No, Miss Granger. For this, at least, I do not need your help.'

* * *

With the faint clatter of pans coming from downstairs, Hermione decided that she'd been given an opportunity to briefly browse the contents of these shelves, and the thought of such a blissful pursuit filled her with unbridled joy.

To her eye, there didn't appear to be much logic that determined where particular subjects were housed in the room, bar a general usefulness to Professor Snape.

In the immediate vicinity of the great console of desks, spanning almost the entire ground floor, were thousands of books on potions, potion theory, and care of magical creatures and plants—texts ranging from the summoning powers of hellebore syrup to Dumbledore's own thirteen dragonhide-bound volumes on the uses of dragon's blood, the history of Felix Felicis and its clandestine connections to every major potions breakthrough since its inception in the 18th century, to a hefty book that was interestingly titled _Robins Necrotic: a History of Saint Mungo's Offensive on Avian Humility_. Back editions of _Potions Quarterly_ from as early as 1405, all here in their entirety, their spines so battered and broken Hermione daren't pluck them off their shelves.

On the back wall, in front of that Gryffindor-ish Persian rug, was a seemingly comprehensive section on Alchemy – a field entirely maintained by the scholarship of Nicolas Flamel; indeed, most of the books on these shelves were gifts to the Professor from Flamel himself, including what appeared to be a chest of correspondence—it was a burnished copper chest, with _NF Letters_ engraved on the spine—slotted on the shelf between the books, and Hermione figured that she may try all her life to befriend Professor Snape and he still may not allow her to read them. The collection of alchemy books itself was worth a fortune; not in the main Hogwarts' catalogue, or the Restricted Section, was there a single text on the volatile art of Alchemy; the tome in which Hermione had found mention of Nicolas Flamel in her first year was merely a collection on notable witches and wizards of the millennium and their equally notable findings.

And then, as she put her foot on the step ladder, to climb up to the upper level, she caught sight of her knees. They were still speckled with bits of mud and grass from earlier, and she decided that though this may not be a dress-robes-for-dinner household, her mother certainly insisted that she should at least wash her hands before dinner, and the brushing of one's hair surely didn't go amiss.

As she exited the room this thought of her parents almost winded her. How long had it been since she'd seen them—how long had it _really_ been? When she got to the bottom of the stairs, and onto the first-floor landing, sat on the stairs for a moment, her head in her hands.

'Just calm down, Hermione,' she thought. 'Mum and dad are fine. You are not a child. You are a young woman. A witch. You do not need your Mummy and Daddy.' And every moment of such mollification did nothing but make the tears fall faster. 'I am stuck here. I am stuck here trying to . . . trying to save the wizarding world on my own. Well,' she thought, 'I have Professor Snape . . . I think.' And that, she supposed, was some consolation. 'And he is nicer than I figured he would be. And he will be nicer still. I will be okay.'

Gripping the bannister, she hauled herself to her feet—the creaking of the floorboards made the rattle of metal downstairs stop for a few seconds, but it resumed as she walked on, and entered her room.

The room's proportions had not been tinkered with by magic. There was a small fireplace, two dark wood dressers set on either side of the chimney, slotted back against the walls—the bottom half panelled in a warm walnut wood, the upper painted in a navy. A four-post bed with cool, pale blue, silk bedding sat in front of the bay window. On the floor, another plush carpet, brown, with a pile so thick and unperturbed, she thought that perhaps the house had been newly decorated. In the centre of the ceiling hung an ornate crystal chandelier, and on the wall to her right, a muggle clock surrounded by half a dozen framed studies of potions ingredients and arithmanthic formulae.

It was tastefully decorated, and uncluttered. Every drawer empty, even of dust—she quickly summoned her own clothes from her satchel and set them inside with a flourish of her wand, and the sheets perfumed with the clean floral scent of muggle laundry detergent and fabric softener. She plucked out one of her many striped jumpers, linen trousers, her smalls, and, possessed with an impromptu urge, headed to the bathroom with her wand, a small tote of toiletries, and a towel.

The bathroom, she found, was rather narrow—if she stretched out her arms, her fingertips would almost touch the walls on either side. Every inch of the room bar the ceiling was panelled in white marble with silver veins, so stark that it hurt her eyes when she entered. The grouting between the tiles, the opaque curtain drawn around the porcelain bath-shower combo, devoid of mildew. A large frosted window was set into the wall at the back, in front of which sat the toilet and sink. No mirrors, she noticed. Not a single mirror in the bathroom, not even in her bedroom; not that she was particularly vain, but she found it rather disconcerting.

She turned the shower on and quickly got out of her school clothes. When she bathed, she lathered her coconut-scented shampoo in her hair, scrubbed at her knees and the soles of her feet with a pumice stone, stared down pensively at her crotch where downy hair had not only taken root, but grew aplenty. 'It's happening,' she thought. 'It's finally happening.' Hermione looked to her chest, wondering whether anything had developed between this morning and now, but no such luck. Speaking in rather medical terms last summer, Hermione's mother had given her a brief talk on the topic of puberty as they chopped vegetables for dinner – a discussion punctuated with nothing but shifty glances between mother and daughter, and her father's humming from the garden as he worked on pruning the hawthorn tree – and during that conversation Jean described herself as a "late bloomer", an "overnight woman", "gamine" until she had her first crush on a boy called Oliver. 'One day,' Jean said, 'I woke up, and needed a d-cup. The next day I'd soiled my bedsheets.' Hermione had never really invested in her mother's hyperbole—'a woman's body,' she thought, 'is not a series of falling dominoes.'—but even she had to admit, these changes were picking up pace. She dreaded the thought of soiling her sheets with blood at Professor Snape's house but understood that it very well may be a possibility. 'At least,' she thought, 'I can warn myself.'

Hermione, pink and clean, climbed out of the bath, and with her wand in-hand muttered a series of vanishing spells on the water that clung to the tiles, on the spool of hair in the drain. With her clothes tugged on, and back inside her room, she dried her unruly hair with a jet of hot air from the tip of her wand—her hairdryer substitute—and then wrapped it into a tight chignon by the aid of a few sticking charms. She crawled to the centre of her new bed, sat cross-legged, waited to be called.

Hermione had obviously become rather adept at this waiting game, and she'd learned to use that time in certain proactive ways—the main one being reading, _of course_. Now, thoughts drifted to an obscure text on the seventh-year Muggle Studies curriculum: a slim volume titled _Minus the Mudblood_ , _Minus the Muggle_ which Hermione had read in February, cover to cover, sat on a toilet seat in the Fiasco Room, in a single sitting. She had thought about it every day since. 

The author, Gerard Rosier, spoke at length on the issue of inserting muggleborn witches and wizards into wizarding society without proper introduction; he detailed the abject fear of a world where concerns over the preservation of tradition existed only amongst the elite, for it should be the concern of every pureblood wizard, well-bred or not. Rosier, though a pureblood, had found himself in the seventeenth century, with more debt than income, and sleeping on the sofa of an unnamed muggleborn wizard, out of favour with the elites. His book was, essentially, a writing-up of his observations—like muggles did after interrailing through Europe on a gap year, living off biscuits and good-will—and it was a damning reproof of muggleborns. Three days after an underwhelming publication, Gerard Rosier was found dead in Richmond Park, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans tongue, his hands a stump of palm. His horrific mutilation propelled the book's infamy: it was reprinted, revised, and translated into several languages—which told Hermione everything, of course—and it went on to spur the likes of Grindelwald and his followers.

The Muggle Studies curriculum left much to be desired, and the teacher Charity Burbage—no more than five years older than Hermione, and already a shuffling, meek kind, partial to crotchet shawls and divining crystals—appeared to Hermione to view the Muggle population in much the same regard as Arthur Weasley: a curious circus act. It was no surprise to Hermione that the curriculum was in such a shoddy state, given this widespread exoticism of the muggle populous.

She found it exceptionally telling that Rosier's answer to the problem of muggleborn socialisation—as it was seemingly impossible to stop the occurrence of muggleborns altogether—had been carefully redacted from all those translations and reprints. Luckily, Hogwarts held just the original text, and if Burbage was to recommend it to her students at all, Hermione would rather it be the original version, and she was glad that it was. Because Rosier, for all intents and purposes, advised implementing a changeling program. The Ministry should take muggleborns from the cradle and plant them in magical households. And, loathe as she was to admit, for it went against her pride and the very fabric of her being, Hermione saw the benefits.

She vividly recalled the image of Professor McGonagall in all her tweed glory, sat on her battered living room couch in mid-July before her first year at Hogwarts began breaking the news to her parents.

'Congratulations,' she said, beaming as much as the old professor could, 'young Hermione is a witch.'

'You daft woman!' cried her mother, at her feet. 'How dare you!'

And suddenly and simultaneously, between herself and her father, there existed a vacuum of space. At such news, pureblood fathers did not lapse into a brief and ferocious depression, mothers did not cower at the sight of harmless accidental magic, pureblood students absolutely did not have to hide their wands in old shoeboxes in a dusty attic like she did that first summer after Hogwarts. And Hermione, the muggleborn, did—at least at first.

The experiments with her father were results of a concentrated effort to bring her parents into the fold, to have them understand the nature of the wizarding world and why it could use some of their inventiveness. She was making discernible progress, but it was slow going. And there were two futures before her, as she understood it: one, where her parents would accept her entirely and her magic become utterly mundane; or the second, where she'd disentangle and extricate herself from their lives and memories.

'Was,' she thought, hundreds of times since reading that book, 'the more ethical solution a changeling? Was Rosier right? How much pain could we have avoided?'

* * *

Hermione figured that it had been almost an hour since Snape had departed to make dinner, and given the piquant scent of stewing meat and garlic that was wafting upstairs, she assumed that he'd been successful in deciding what to make her for her first supper here at Spinner's End. Yet, she had been resigned to her waiting, and made do with listening to him move around downstairs. Occasionally, the thrum of his voice reverberated up towards her, and it took her a little while to realise he may be singing to himself, which she found inexplicably endearing. If he hadn't had expressed that she was most unwelcome downstairs, and if the floorboards did not creak so much, she might have had her ear pressed to the door.

When Snape called, with apparently all the irritation he could muster, 'You can come down now!' it had been almost two and half hours, and she'd been half drifting off to sleep, so jumped. She couldn't think of the last time she'd been so unproductive, and cursed herself for not going back up to the library and discovering what lay on the upper floor—she'd do that the next chance she got.

'Coming!' she cried back, and again felt a pang in her chest: homesickness. She got to her feet, slid on her slippers. 'One moment!'

As she made her way down the stairs, the scent of dinner churned her stomach, made her salivate. The professor was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, now down to just his shirt, though the cuffs were buttoned; little bits of pale-yellow grease speckled the white cotton, and he'd thrown a turmeric-stained dishcloth over his shoulder. 'Another rung?' she thought, and tried not to stare at the disarmingly human figure he cut.

He stared down at her slippers the entire time, sneering—lips pulled back over his crowded teeth—as soon as they were eye level. Hermione, of course, was mortified. The slippers had definitely seen better days, having been worn down on the floors of the Gryffindor common room and dormitory; she'd learned to sew just to mend the holes in the soles. On the bottom step, she could merely smile at Snape.

'Hi,' she said. He scoffed, though he was still looking down at the slippers; they were Gryffindor red, which did not help. 'Is dinner done?'

He turned on his heel without answering, and lead her out to the garden, via the cluttered living room. Outside, he'd laid the table, a round and shallow, pale-blue ceramic casserole dish sat in the centre of the table, covered.

'Those are the most nauseating articles of footwear I've ever seen,' he said, pulling out the heavy iron chair; it was more forthright than she'd expected, though he _was_ Professor Snape. 'And you wear them, flouncing about in public, I assume?' She nodded, and sat down, eyeing the china plate, splattered artfully with blue ink. 'Of course, you do. And you've been mending them by hand, like some muggle twit, instead of a basic _Reparo_?' She nodded, watching him sit opposite, laying his wand on the table. 'Of course. When you have the time . . .' The Time-Turner, which rested in the valley between her breasts, underneath her jumper, drew his gaze. 'Must you constantly wear that damnable thing?' he hissed, averting his eyes, conjuring utensils, and a cloth-covered basket.

'Yes,' she said, finding her voice, and pouring a shallow glass of pulpy orange juice for them both. 'I don't trust myself otherwise.'

'But you trust yourself to use it?' he said.

'Obviously,' she said, which he found infuriating, naturally, for she'd stolen one of his lines and delivered it just as well—or, at least, she seemed to think so.

'Meddlesome chit,' he muttered.

'Thank you, Sir,' she said, reeling at how she could so easily speak to her professor with such obvious insolence, but she could hardly help it. Was it really just this afternoon where they'd been on Hogwarts' grounds? 'And _am I_ to expect a constant cycle of insult and, well, silence?' she asked.

He glared at her, though it was evident his heart wasn't really in it: his mouth twitched, his eyes, though were intent on staring her down, grew crinkled at the edges. 'Let's not,' he said, in a warning tone, the slow breeze moving his hair about his face. 'This isn't a game you'll win, girl.'

She crossed her arms. 'I'm basically sixteen, Professor. Hardly a mere girl.'

The glare she received in response to that particular response was rather more genuine; so much so, that she found herself physically recoiling at the open hostility he emanated. Hermione could sense his magical discharge pouring into the space between them, the taste like heady treacle; her own magic felt rather neutered and submissive in response, buzzing in her ears, tingling in the nape of her neck—symptomatic of her underdevelopment. Had she been a fully-fledged mature witch, her magic would have answered and challenged such open intimidation, it would have warmed her entire body.

'That's enough,' she said quietly, 'I think you've made your point well enough, Professor Snape.'

In a move too quick to track, he leaned over the narrow table, tilted up her chin with the bent knuckle of his forefinger, holding it between that and the pad of his thumb. His hands were ice-cold and smelled of ginger.

'And what point would that be?' he asked.

'That I'm just a girl,' she answered, her pulse pounding in her ears.

'Do you feel you're _just a girl_?'

'No,' she thought, 'I don't feel like a girl at all.' But she could hardly divulge such intimate concerns; it was bad enough that earlier she'd all but confirmed she was a virgin, but Snape needn't know how far away from womanhood she truly was. 'No,' she said, 'I'm . . .' and she stuttered. Because what Hermione, in all her Gryffindor earnestness, wanted to express was that she was a witch, and thus questions about girlhood and womanhood were narrowminded and blinkered; they belonged with other muggle rhetoric she'd attempted to train her mind to disregard. Initially, Hermione had observed it in the way the pureblood witches held themselves, right then in that first year; witches like Parvati Patel and Pansy Parkinson, who sat with ramrod-straight backs, spritzed perfume on their wrists between classes, and still used a wand in First-Year Charms as if it were another limb. They were _born_ witches. They were witches who perceived the loftiness of their pedigree and performed accordingly. Professor McGonagall had not appeared on a doorstep and 'broke' the news to the Parkinson and Patel parents—it was observed, assumed, and unexceptional. 'I am a witch,' she said, as resolute as she could manage, wrenching her chin out of his hold. She held out a serving spoon.

'Indeed.'

He withdrew his hand as if he'd been burned, and began portioning out what looked to be the most delicious-looking chicken curry she'd ever seen—the top dotted with sprigs of fresh green coriander, trim kernels of cumin, and ginger sliced into short slender chopsticks. The food at Hogwarts, she had come to understand, was hardly aware of anything remotely east of Norwich, which was odd considering the multi-ethnic cohort of Hogwarts students, indeed the United Kingdom; even pasta was a novelty and a sure-fire sign that the elves were in a most playful mood. The last time she'd had a curry was the Friday night before returning to Hogwarts last year, and that realisation almost made her tear up a little at the sight of the modest auburn stew.

After doling out their portions, Snape reached into the basket, pulled out a steaming whole-wheat chapatti, blooming with just the right amount of char, buttered on one side, folded in half. He opened it up, cradled it in his hands, and blew a small stream of air to cool it a mere fraction; then he tore it in two and handing half to her, the butter dripping down the side of his hands, narrowly missing his cuffs.

She took the bread, and looked at the man, who already appeared to be waiting for a comment. 'Am I this predictable?' she thought. 'Thank you,' she said. He nodded, looking down at his plate, tearing off a bite-sized scrap of chapatti, dragging it through the thick gravy. 'I should have guessed, really,' she added, following suit.

'What?' he asked, the sodden bread at his lips.

'That you'd be brewing a potion.'


	6. Room

* * *

**CHAPTER SIX**   
**ROOM**

* * *

'What happened to your cat?' Professor Snape said, twirling an ornate silver teaspoon in a builder's mug of tea spiked with one misshapen lump of sugar.

It was the morning following their inaugural curry and Hermione had woken from her fitful sleep to the sound of the shower running. She'd dreamt she was the mother of the Fates, skipping through a hot open-air market and suddenly finding herself trapped beneath a grey-haired man oddly resembling Professor Binns, the dull History of Magic lecturer—dull for he was a ghost, though in the dream he was decidedly more corporeal than his usual form. The townsfolk looked on with indifference as she struggled beneath him. And then, a low thrum of music; when she woke, she heard the professor humming in the shower, a sound amplified by all the tile in the bathroom and she found it settled right into the pit of her stomach, flaring her magic.

The morning light streamed into her room from under the heavy drapes and a quick tempus charm told her it was just past six-thirty. When the professor left the bathroom, she counted to one hundred and made her way there herself. She stood for far too long in the heavy mist, staring at the bar of olive-green soap that rested in a shallow earthen dish on the edge of the bath, bubbles still alive on its surface, a little white from where the lather remained, a long dark hair imbedded in its surface. It took all the will she possessed to leave the soap where it was and use her own—it would be one infringement on his person too far if she started sharing his heady herbal soap . . .

'Miss Granger?' he said, thrusting a mug into her hands, snapping her out of the most perverse reveries she'd ever entertained, 'Did you hear what I said?' He clutched his own cup to his chest, burrowing it against himself. 'Or are you still half-asleep?' He dragged his fingers through his hair, curling one side behind his ear; he was dressed in black trousers, belted, his black silk shirt tucked loosely around his hips: though, the cuffs wide and open at his wrists, dotted with half a dozen undone buttons, his collar open. The only time she'd seen him without a robe was when he duelled with that hack, Professor Lockhart, in the second year. This state of undress? Unprecedented.

'Are you asking after my cat?' she asked.

'Indeed,' he said.

'Professor McGonagall said she'd take Crookshanks to my parents,' she said, missing the orange kneazle dearly all of a sudden. 'The merepeople don't abide felines.'

He blinked. 'Pardon?'

She laughed, and walked past him, saying, 'It's part of my cover story,' she said, hearing him huff and follow. She'd spent far too much time dallying this morning, and it was high time that she go back to the library. 'I'm supposed to be at a summer school for extraordinarily gifted students,' she elaborated, taking the stairs carefully, making sure not to slosh her tea. She heard him mutter something that sounded rather like a derisory 'of course' but continued on: ' . . . and it just so happens to be at the bottom of the Black Lake. I am learning the ways of the mermaids, you see, and helping maintain wizard-mere relations in the lead-up to a top-secret event happening at Hogwarts next year.'

'And what event may that be?' he asked, overtaking her on the landing with a huff, and hurrying up.

'The Headmaster just waved me off when I asked,' she said. 'Though, there must be at least some fragment of truth to his story, don't you think?' Snape grumbled a noncommittal sound, and she lagged behind a moment, dipping into her room to fetch her satchel.

When she entered the library, Hermione made certain her eyes didn't linger too long over the vast tapestry, else she would waste another day staring at it.

Professor Snape had already settled his cup on the desk, tapping his wand on the stray books which began floating, and sprinting off to slot in the vacant spots on the bookshelves, passing through the protective glass that parted like smoke to welcome them, and the last slim volume with gilded French flaps zipping like a snitch through the wooden gangways suspended above. Hermione was somewhat exhilarated at the display, which put the Hogwarts librarian Madam Pince's filing to shame; she, of course, had been around at the very end of the day, and had seen the woman slide the tip of her short, pale wand across the spines of dozens of books per minute, witnessed them tiredly take up their posts on the shelves. This minor discrepancy between the two's filing efficiency, she figured, was because Professor Snape's magic was far more potent than Pince's, a bland observation on the surface, but it set her mind reeling.

'Professor,' she said, 'what affects magical potency?' He cast a look at her from the corner of his eye and continued on as if he'd never heard her, manually reorganising the things on the desks. It took her a moment to realise that he was freeing a desk for her own use, which she found unexpectedly touching. In the corner he placed a few sturdy-looking feathers tipped with steel nibs, a stack of loose parchment, and decanted faint jets of indigo, black, and vermillion ink from unmarked crystal drums into small wells. 'Thank you,' she said, settling her bag a few feet away from the professor. 'I'll just fetch my books,' she said, opened the flap, and stepped onto the ladder and into her bag.

' _Fucking hell!_ ' Professor Snape cried as she vanished, the curse at a volume which almost made her miss a rung. 'Just what do you think you're doing, Granger?' he yelled, his voice echoing in the vast space she now found her in, following her down as she touched the floor.

She watched him pass through an impossibly small gap in the centre of the vaulted ceiling, draped in swathes of the same emerald silk that lined the inside of her bag. Brassy limbs extended out from the upper rungs of the ladder, and wound themselves into chandeliers and lighting fixtures, dotted with the same ever-lit candles she'd seen in a fancy homewares store in Diagon Alley last summer. The floors were the darkwood herringbone kind she'd imagined, so reminiscent of her home and her Gryffindor dormitory. The space was easily twice the size of the Great Hall, roughly rectangular—one of the longer sides lined with empty shelves, the other panelled and empty—the shorter taken up by two vast stained-glass windows. One depicting Dante's Hell, with all its many levels and sinners, their pale bodies warped, their faces twisted in agony; the other twisted her heart.

When Snape stood beside her, he held the ladder in a grip so tight his knuckles looked like they might pierce his skin. 'You don't seem the type to have a thousand spare Galleons lying around,' he said, confusing her entirely.

'I have a . . . modest account at Gringotts, sir.'

His dark eyes shot to hers, hand loosening on the ladder. He stepped further into the room, cautiously tapping his foot on the floor and it sounded back a hollow sound like he was knocking on the side of a vacant wardrobe. 'Unfortunately, Miss Granger, this is the sign you were swind—' His eyes grew wide, taking in the stained glass on the right-hand-side of the room, and whipped to the other left, the buttery light flooding in, casting a muted palette of hues over the floor.

When he looked back to her, from a few feet away, 'An Undetectable Extension charm,' Hermione said, looking around at the cavernous thing she'd conjured from the nothingness of magic, and wondered where on the scale of potency she would place herself—if it was a scale at all! 'I performed it yesterday afternoon,' she supplied, recalling how often these kind of charms slipped and reversed in the initial hours; if it held for four hours, then it would hold forever, regardless of whether the witch or wizard who cast it lived—she imagined a populated library bursting at the seams of her bag, exploding into the world upon her death, like a book bomb. 'O, the carnage,' she thought, spotting the unruly contingent of her belongings behind her: the totes, now empty of her clothes, lay wilted, and her trunk with books splattered around.

**=/=**

Severus Snape had awoke that morning with his wand already in his hand and the thunderous peal of the milkman's float rattling into Spinner's End. What followed was simply the melody of industrialised suburbia: the chime of glass bottles landing on doorsteps, murmured goodbyes at the thresholds, the snare drum of diesel engines turning over and, given that this was a relatively poverty-stricken part of Manchester, a violently misogynistic curse, the petering out of mechanics, a re-attempt, a success, a drunkard shouting expletives.

Over the years, his colleagues had attempted to persuade him to move to a magical neighbourhood—suffice to say, they knew better than to recommend anywhere as bucolic or hackneyed as Ottery St Catchpole or neighbouring Chudley, Godric's Hollow out of the question entirely—but the idea of Hogsmeade was proposed a few times by Minerva and Flitwick, Mould-on-the-Wold by Dumbledore. And though the thought of owning a townhouse or a flat in magical London held a fraction of appeal, he also understood that should the Dark Lord return, it would be the first place razed to the ground and begrudgingly rebuilt to become the epicentre of depravity; not quite his scene—in adulthood, at least. 72 Spinner's End was his home, and it was his. Yes, it always took him several days to reacclimatise; yes, he would often wake as he had done this morning, wand in hand, at the sound of ambulance sirens or milk floats; but these things he could abide and would likely occur elsewhere too. What he couldn't abide were brazen infringements on his solitude, which made his current predicament a vexing one.

He watched the chit tidy her books away back in her trunk; the trunk in her bag, along with the girl, and him, and two thirty-foot tall stained-glass windows. 'Fucking magic,' he thought, 'and fucking Hermione Granger.'

'This'—he gestured at the room—'may almost give you a Mastery in Charms.' If they were in any place but his home, he may have sneered at her, stood silent, but here he would not begrudge her the compliment. Hollow floor aside, for a magically malnourished and underdeveloped witch to perform the charm so well . . . Even Severus Snape saw cause to congratulate her.

She smiled at him and mumbled, 'Thank you, Professor.' Hauling herself to her feet, she waved her wand to shoot the trunk out of the opening, and walked back over to him. 'It was my first go,' she said.

'Impressive,' he replied, nodding. 'If you were in any better health, you may have fashioned yourself an entire castle.' Granger giggled, a sound which only served to remind him of her relative innocence. 'And that may be the last compliment I ever bestow upon you, Miss Granger.'

'We'll see, Professor,' she goaded, and climbed back up the ladder and into his library.

Flitwick, upon seeing Granger perform _Leviosa_ so effortlessly in her first week at Hogwarts, had bet a semester's wages on the witch joining the teaching faculty as soon as she'd graduated. Trelawny, three sherries deep into dinner, had dropped her voice two octaves and remarked that the girl's future was as consequential as a speck of sand. Given that he did not make habit of engaging in such wagers, Severus had not commented all those years ago—though, in the weeks and months and years which followed, he would often be the first to bemoan her niffler-like enthusiasm for information.

Flitwick's bet went unanswered—his semester of wages safe in his vault—because Severus, and the remainder of the teaching staff knew, that despite the unchallenged and pious regard in which she held the written word, if given a nurturing enough environment, Hermione Granger would at the very least become a professor of Hogwarts—the best Wizarding school in the northern hemisphere; she'd be Headmistress, even, if the governors could be swayed out of their blood prejudices. Of course, Minerva believed she was destined for the highest office in the land: Minister of Magic, and no less. Except, stood as he was now, in this vast room, eyes flitting between Dante's blasted Hell and—beyond even his comprehension—some Flemish notion of Heaven which had reoccurred far too often as of late, Granger holding an occupation at all seemed far-fetched. Fate was preparing the chit for another battle entirely, and Severus suspected that it was very much in orbit of the black hole that was the Dark Lord's brand, burned into his left arm, growing ever darker by the day.

'That daft Sybil was right,' he thought, crawling out of her cavernous bag-room, and catching sight of her on the upper-level of the library, salivating over his pitifully modest collection of Theoretical Arithmancy. Ironically enough, it was his own short-sightedness that tampered, yet again, with Sybil's off-handed prophecy. Because Granger's remarkability did indeed depend upon that grain of sand: if it were plucked from a coast, she would amount to nothing; but if that grain was the finite kind, imbued with the most sacred and guarded magic ever known, and perhaps if the final grain was caught and suspended in her Time-Turner, then it would be another matter entirely. 'Inconsequential?' he thought. 'Unlikely. Pain in the arse, nonetheless? Odds even I would take.'

After she had gone to bed last night, he had returned here, back to this library of his, and resumed his contemplation over the tapestry. He'd inherited it a handful of winters ago, upon the death of the last heir of the Prince line, and it, along with many of the rugs in this room—they did wonders to keep the warmth in, make the room feel somewhat hospitable. Much of the furniture in Granger's room he'd been bequeathed like this, and whatever Dark artefacts and useless knickknacks remained, were piled up in his Gringotts vault awaiting some future period of usefulness. Of course, there was no actual land or property to speak of. Prince Manor, like many ancestral homes of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, was secret-kept, and sold for parts, in the end—even the Prince Elves had been disbanded and sold to any family or business that would take them—all to settle gambling debts, dowries, and funerals. The tapestries, rugs, etc., were beyond even Borgin and Burke's help. Yet, this rough diamond that hung above his hearth—a scene which was near sacrilege to pureblood sentimentalities—looked to be another working of the Fates, or, divine intervention as the hapless muggles would suppose.

Granger floated down what looked to be his entire compendium of Retrospective Arithmancy, and he figured that the two of them had boarded the same train of thought. He went to his desk, taking a seat with his back to the tapestry, but now very much opposite the girl—a trade-off, which signified just how out-of-sorts he'd found himself, and she would no doubt note.

As he began to answer the piles of neglected correspondence which had accumulated over the weeks—mainly editors of potions journals pestering him about his forthcoming articles—, Granger made her way down, and set about fashioning an olive-green leather wingback for herself out of a stray bit of parchment. Again, this was magic far more advanced than she had any right to know at this stage in her academic progression; magic that, of course, she performed with all the mechanical and unfeeling gesticulations she'd learnt in textbooks. He felt her eyes on him, but he abhorred the thought of becoming some simpering fatherly mascot for the girl over the summer, patting her head and offering her a liquorice wand whenever she did something so humdrum. Truly, it sickened him. But, of course, being Hermione Granger, she continued to stare and whittle away at his patience. 'Is there something you need?' he asked, finally taking his eyes off his quill and parchment, and taking a long drag of his now lukewarm tea. She spluttered, her cheeks grew pink, fidgeting in her hideously attractive new chair. 'Insufferable know-it-all,' he thought.

'I . . .' she croaked, and cleared her throat. 'I just wanted to ask you something.'

'Oh?' he said, setting down his crow-feather quill.

'It's a favour, really . . . Whether you might brew me—or point me in the direction of—something for the malnourishment. I've been taking a half-dose of a Metal Moste Momentary every third day because I'm almost out, and as you know—'

'Restorative potions take at least a week to brew,' he supplied.

'Yes. Yes.'

In truth, when he had popped over to the nearest corner shop for groceries yesterday, he had also apparated to The Apothecary in Diagon Alley, and put in an order for her near-useless potion. He had also asked the owner Silvanus Selwyn to order in a double-stock for everything in his storeroom knowing the girl would be raiding it in no time.

He waved a hand. 'I ordered a quart for you yesterday, which should last you until the end of the week,' he said. 'But I will begin brewing you something far superior this afternoon when I go to pick up the order – you will use that thereafter.'

'You've already—'

He cut her off. 'Yes. Dumbledore has entrusted me with your safety, and I have never made a habit of shirking my responsibilities; I will not start now. You cannot exist like this in my presence, Miss Granger.'

She leaped to her feet in an instance, and rushed over to him. 'Thank you, Professor,' she gushed, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. 'Thank you. Th—'

'Enough of that,' he snapped, making the chit jump and retract herself from his person. 'Control yourself, you sill—!'

'Will you stop that?' she whispered. 'Stop it!'

And now he was at his feet too, hating how she'd pushed him to it, how her abused magic tasted like sour iron, as if he'd stuck his tongue in a rusty keyhole—or, now that he considered it for a moment, like rancid blood. He looked at her, her purpling face, the way her shoulders crumpled inwards, the vein in her neck visibly pulsing. Outside, rain began to pelt the windows; up above, his charmed ceiling showed a second day of Scottish Highland storms.

'I will call you whatever I deem appropriate,' he said. 'Silly, even, if that's what you're being.'

Granger had the temerity to sigh. 'I'd hoped . . .' she started, and then shook her head.

This indecision, this lack of forethought before speaking, infuriated him further, and suddenly his hands were wrapped around her shoulders, shaking her. 'Just what exactly had you been hoping for?'

She twisted in his arms for a second, her lips pulled back into a snarl. 'That we'd all been wrong,' she hissed. 'That you weren't as awful as we'd thought . . . That you may be rational, Professor Snape.'

Severus released her and resumed his seat, realising his own heart was hammering in his chest. 'I simply ask that you respect my privacy and personal space,' he ground out. 'You are my ward for the summer, Granger, and as such I shall attempt to keep you alive, engage in any academic discourse, and brew a potion should you require it for your task. Beyond that . . . ?' Out the corner of his eye, he watched her hand twitch. 'Beyond that, nothing. I am not your friend. Erase any designs you have upon my person.' He heard her scoff and resume her seat, and begin reading in a fashion that could only be described as 'affected'.

Severus picked up a quill and continued fashioning a reply to Messers Cape and Wormwood, editors of _The European Potions Review_. They had requested yet another article from him on the accelerated Mandrake Restorative Draught he'd brewed last year – petrification reversal was a relatively unstudied and dangerous branch of potions, and word had spread that the Potions Master at Hogwarts had perfected and used a brew upon the students. Given that Severus had patented the potion and a month's earning had supplanted every galleon he'd ever made as a Hogwarts professor, it seemed imprudent to further entertain these venerable crooks. 'The audacity,' he thought, and bought down his ire upon them and several others that were attempting to take him for a fool. Back when he had achieved his Mastery, he may have made such mistakes, but this was almost two decades hence.

This amused him for a while: the methodical and melodic scratch of his quill, the chime of the gold nib against his inkpot, even the girl's noisy page-turning, her voiced sighs, muttered exclamations. It was not the kind of silence he'd been used to, but it was eminently preferable to the charged atmosphere of earlier. But soon, when his letters finished, and they lay before him sealed with Slytherin-green wax, he was thinking on Granger again, her book, his tapestry.

'Is it impossible to go forward in time?' he asked, trusting that in this, at least, she would know more than him.

Granger jumped, which he had expected, but it obviously annoyed him, nonetheless. 'I don't think so,' she said, tearing off a thumb-sized scrap of parchment from the corner of whatever she was working on and sticking it between the pages. 'No . . . It just hasn't been done – not that we know of.' Setting the book down, she scrubbed her face with her hands and yawned into the crease of her elbow. 'It is completely coherent with all known laws of physics, and many muggle scientists have devoted their lives to studying it,' she said, 'but there is not a single piece of literature on the topic in the magical world. I have checked. This leads me to believe that it's Ministry-controlled information, which is problematic.' When she paused for an interjection, and he supposed that his expression told her to continue. 'Because information and research should be classless and democratic, Professor, and free for all to access and read,' she said. 'It is morally wrong for them to bar some knowledge, in my opinion. If the Ministry is hiding it, then I assume they are using it, which, again, is problematic.'

'Quite the cynic,' he remarked – though, of course, she was right in every way; he was glad the books were teaching her this much, at least.

'Well . . . in any case,' she said, 'it is only _slightly_ possible. You would need to either be travelling at almost the speed of light or beside a cosmic body with enough gravity to bend the fabric of space.'

'Is that all?' he said, even his mind struggling to imagine such a thing.

She fought a smile. 'It might literally tear your body into strings of atoms, but really, Professor, the more difficult thing, in terms of muggle physics, is going back in time, which'—she pulled out her blasted Time-Turner, and stared down at it—'we have almost perfected. These are Ministry-controlled but they are obviously far more lax here if they are willing to hand them over to a fourteen-year-old. So, again, there must be something up. I expect it has something to do with that stomach-turning flaw.' Granger ran her fingers over the hourglass and shot him a look. 'Was there a reason why you asked?'

'Yes,' he said, getting to his feet, and beginning to pace the width of the room. 'You say that you found that book from the future. A future almost six years from now, seven from when you received the book. You would be—what? Twenty-three? Older, if you keep Turning and reliving the same godforsaken day. Which means, unless you find a way to move forward in time, there is an older version of you here in this present moment, stuck. And she will be at the very least thirty years of age before catching up with herself. That is why I ask, Granger.' He stopped and turned to the girl, who was simply smiling at him like the infuriating swot that she was.

'Yes, that's correct,' she said. 'It took me a few weeks to realise this – hence my research into the future. Unless we find a way to break into the Time Room itself and uncover research that may or may not exist, it seems an impossibility. Even my most conservative estimates have me at thirty-four years-old in 2006.'

Should he survive the imminent rise of the Dark Lord—as much of an improbability as Granger's infiltration of the Department of Mysteries—Severus would be forty-six, and less than a decade older than her. This, more than any word exchanged today, was the most shocking of all revelations. Hermione Granger would, in 2006, may perhaps be as old as he was now. And since he was a red-bloodied male, after all, Severus couldn't help but soon think of the kind of wizard she'd be taking to bed, whether she may have time for her no-longer-so-old professor . . .

Severus wandlessly summoned his robes and frock coat which materialised around his shoulders, picked up his pile of outgoing post, announced, 'I am going to send these off.' And he promptly apparated.


	7. Intent

* * *

_  
It is forbidden to kill;_   
_therefore all murderers are punished_   
_unless they kill in large numbers_   
_and to the sound of trumpets._

— Voltaire  
  


* * *

**CHAPTER SEVEN**

**INTENT**

* * *

  
It was a Friday lunchtime and given that school had broken up for the summer, Diagon Alley was rammed to the rafters with bodies. Ministry employees were out in their droves, crumbs of their greasy pumpkin pasties littering their robes, mouths crusted with bile, eyes with sleep. A contingent of goblins stood outside Gringotts, pipes in hand, blowing runes of smoke. But, given that most people owned a household owl, the Post Office was blessedly quiet. Severus merely had to hand his post in, pay a few Knuts, decline yet another offer from the elderly and overzealous shop assistant to purchase an owl (if he owned one, he would hardly leave the house), pick up the few letters addressed to him, and then he was on his way to The Apothecary.

Working his way through the throng of witches, wizards, goblins, squibs, muggle, Severus was thankful that at least people had the good sense and instinct to part and allow him through. Adopting his particular teaching style, it seemed, all but ensured that people forever lived in fear of him. However, those few faces of his peers in the crowds—his class fellows that had studied right alongside him, occupied the same halls, were cooked for by the same elves—seemed to freeze in recognition, then tended to morph into one of three options: rage, indifference, and, of course, terror: and this was the intangible mark the Dark Lord had left upon him and his soul. Severus kept his gaze forward, met every eye that dared to acknowledge him, and stopped to chat with nobody he recognised for no one stopped to chat with him. This was the way of his world, and nobody spared him a smile.

The Apothecary was as deserted as the Post Office, though he nearly bumped into a woman leaving the shop in a haste—he almost smiled and attempted to get a good look at her face, but she apparated before he'd the chance. The owner Silvanus Selwyn greeted him warmly at the door, clasping his shoulders in greeting, pressing his own leathery cheek to Severus' right and left. Silvanus was a whole head taller than the already six and a half foot Severus, with a carbon-black beard that gave even Dumbledore a run for his money. The single defining feature of the sixty-odd man, however, was the lacewing and hellebore tattoo that covered every inch of his bald head, shining with sebum in the candlelight of the dark shop. Given the state of his dishevelled robes, Severus knew just why the woman was speeding away at his arrival.

Silvanus was one of the few people in Severus' life that he could earnestly consider a friend; he had known him since his first trip to Diagon Alley, and was likely keeping the wizard in business by all his varied orders for all manner of common and rare potions ingredients. Severus' dormmate at Hogwarts was Alexi Selwyn, Silvanus' only son. Said son had been decaying in Azkaban Prison since just after the fall of the Dark Lord. He'd been caught naked in Selwyn Manor's immense ballroom, surrounded by two dozen naked, _Impurised_ , and underage witches, in the middle of a deranged ritual to bring back Voldemort from twenty-four pints of virgin blood. Silvanus had never since spoken a word of Alexi, but given that Silvanus had also levelled his ancestral home in the wake of Alexi's incarceration, he figured all that was said had been said.

'How are you, Sev?' Silvanus said. He flipped the sign to 'closed' and led Severus through the maze of ingredients arranged neatly onto shelves, right to the immense storeroom in the back of the shop.

'As well as I was yesterday,' answered Severus, 'and as well as can be expected,' he muttered to himself, his mind still on Granger.

'Oh?' croaked the man, looking over his shoulder. 'A niffler in the wallet?' He watched the man levitate his order down from the topmost shelf in his storeroom: a reinforced oak crate, rattling ever so slightly with the music of phials, flasks, and ampoules within. A large jar of Granger's Metal Moste Momentary whizzed past his head and back towards the front of the shop. 'Am I to expect an answer today,' Silvanus pressed, 'or the next time you deign to visit me, Severus?'

He frowned. 'Don't whinge, Silv.'

'What has that old coot have you doing now?' he bit out, hauling the crate up into his arms. Severus prised it from him, and the two walked back to the front of the shop. Regardless of the fact that the men were exceptional wizards, magic had been known to interfere and render useless even the most tame of ingredients. 'Your silence speaks for you,' he crooned.

Severus sighed and set the crate down on the counter by the till and cast _Muffilato_ around them. 'The rise of the Dark Lord is imminent,' said Severus. 'So, it is prudent that we prepare. Each of us,' he said. 'Merlin knows that many of our number have grown lax and slipshod and so many brazen.' Silvanus crossed his arms, his navy, chiffon-like robes, revealing the man was more muscle than you'd expect. But, more crucially, beneath the papery fabric one could clearly make out the black skull with its serpent tongue. 'It grows dark,' he said, gesturing at his arm.

Silvanus nodded once, brows drawn. 'Since the Potter boy emerged from his hidey hole—you know as well as I do.'

'And . . . will you answer his call?'

He scoffed. 'It is a forgone conclusion. Will _you_?'

Severus smiled and rolled his eyes, though his insides churned. 'It _is_ a forgone conclusion, Silv. I just hope our brothers have the good sense to do the same.'

He tutted and began slowly clanking away at the timeworn till, calculating the cost of so many ingredients; it surprised Severus that he hadn't already done this, but knew the man had been attempting to get him alone for quite some time. 'Those debauched and cock-forward wastrels are no brothers of mine,' Silvanus said, 'nor are they any brothers of yours. Men like us did not take the Mark because we were short of women warming our beds—'

'Speak for yourself,' muttered Severus, painfully aware of how long it'd been since he'd indulged himself so—even by hand—and how often he'd caught Silvanus hidden among these shelves with a comely witch, even men on one or two occasions, and Silvanus rutting them into the back shelves of The Apothecary; he thought of the woman leaving in haste again, how no red-blooded wizard would treat her full figure with apathy.

'— _nor_ did we take the Mark because we'd like to walk streets paved with the bones of ordinary hapless muggles,' Silvanus continued. 'We condemned ourselves to this state, because we understood something much deeper and much more profound was at stake.' Severus nodded absently, though was somewhat stirred by the grumblings of his life-long comrade. 'Our freedom, Severus. Our Merlinforsaken freedom! The so-called Light present a debased view of magic, and the Ministry castrate us of our power. We are mere _magicians_ , now, Severus, the Dark Lord would have had us _warlocks._ All that lost potential . . .' Silvanus grew silent and grave, and Severus supposed that he was thinking on Alexi—this is how the man spoke of his lost son: in long drawn out silences. He'd worked his way through half the crate of ingredients, but his hands were now clasped around a small box containing shavings of unicorn horn and spools of their pearlescent hair. 'And you know it was never about _blood_ purity,' he said. 'That was just to assuage the minds and bank accounts of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, sway those men who were still loyal to the philosophies of Grindelwald. And no one dare say they truly _knew_ the Dark Lord—'

'Then we dare not say it or imply it,' said Severus, 'but I suspect you're about to.'

Silvanus shook his head and returned back to his careful logging of the potions supplies, silent for some time, visibly and haltingly formulating a reply and failing to articulate it. It took all his control not to cast a wandless and soundless _L_ _egilimens_ and have the answer both men sought. At long last Silvanus said, 'No one dare say they knew the Dark Lord, but it has always been my belief—and of the few enlightened of the Inner Circle—that when the Dark Lord took you within our ranks, Severus, that he had all but chosen his successor, a _prince_ , if you will . . . should his quest for immortality prove—'

'Silv!' he hissed, his hand reaching out and pressing against the other's mouth. 'Control!'

Silvanus wretched himself away. '—should his quest for immortality prove to have unfavourable results; even he was not entirely sure, that is no secret among his Knights. And had not all but a handful of our ranks survived the consequences of his . . . _withdrawal_ from the fray, we would have seen you nominated and by our side in the Inner Circle, and after the death of Abraxas it would be _you_ not that ponce Lucius rise and be leader. Youthful, _brilliant_! Instead, we are indeed left with that wayward rascal Lucius, who talks of his fantasies of us dressing up as muggle racists, no less, nought in common with them but _pointy fucking hats_ . . . Your Potions Mastery, your ascension to Head of Slytherin House, even the way you have kept your eyes on the great Albus Dumbledore for us this long decade, have all but ensured you to be his Hand upon his return. And those of us who see Lucius for what he is, will speak in your honour, _my son_.' He grasped Severus' forearm tightly over the counter and Severus could feel their dormant Marks calling to one another. 'The restoration is coming.'

'The restoration _is_ coming,' he echoed, though growing exponentially desperate to turn the conversation away from such fanaticism. 'Like I say, the rise of the Dark Lord is imminent; it is prophesied to be by the hand of his . . . _servant._ '

Silvanus' brows shot up at the news. 'A prophecy? A _true_ prophecy?'

'Yes.'

'And the serv— _Pettigrew_?'

'Yes.'

'He's alive?'

'Yes. He'd been hiding away as the Weasley pet rat for over a decade. An unfortunate animagus form, but fitting.'

Silvanus scoffed. 'They _would_ keep rats for pets!'

'Evidently. But he will come, Silv, to all our old haunts.'

'Here?'

Severus nodded. 'It's not a stretch to assume that he'll need potions . . . He won't be able to afford much, maybe a tin of bubotuber pus if he's lucky. He'll ask for favours, Silv. He'll come to you, certainly. It's in our interests that we indulge him and keep abreast of his progress.' Severus paced in front of the till, his old but expensive dragonhide boots making no sound at all on the boards. 'Indulge . . . but do not aid.'

'And why not?' Silvanus asked, brows furrowed, voice strained.

Severus said, 'The prophecy states that Pettigrew will set out to re-join his master and the Dark Lord would rise again with _that servant's aid_ , greater and more fearsome than he _ever_ was. I fear that by getting involved, at any level, and skewing the course of fate, we may serve to diminish the . . . overall effect of the Dark Lord's return, so to speak.' Silvanus begrudgingly nodded, looking thoughtful. 'I don't presume to tell you what to do with this information, Silv, but should a certain group show increasing appetite to dress up as muggle racists, I would not deter them in our Lord's name.'

The other man smiled and wrote out a receipt for Severus which he charged to his standing tab. Severus took the box in his arms, and hauled it up to waist-height with a small _uff_ and balanced it on a hip and forearm.

'The more fools that fall upon their wand,' said Silvanus, 'the more efficient operations shall run once he is back.'

'Precisely.' With a nod, Severus turned and made for the door. 'In the meantime,' he said, 'you can continue fucking anything that catches your eye in peace . . . while you still can.' His friend barked out a laugh and showed him out, where Severus summoned the shrunken Firebolt from one robe pocket with his free hand, and fed the crate into one of the other enlarged side-seam pockets. He would fly from Diagon Alley to Manchester – a journey of an hour or so – but being several hundred meters in the sky was much safer for his ingredients than shrinking them or transporting via elf or Floo. And, in any case, it would give Severus some much-needed moments utterly alone before they were infringed upon once more.  
  


**=/=**   
  


After Snape had left her so abruptly, Hermione had paced for a long time around the room, trying to rationalise the Professor's reaction to what she had revealed.

There was a future, a plausible future, where she would be in her mid-thirties in 2006. It was her conservative estimate, and yet she thought it would be far more likely that she would be edging forty. She would have almost ten years on her peers. As she paced, her thoughts swirled back to Snape. She would be far closer to him in age, really. He would be—what? Forty-five? Forty-six? The thought made her pause, made her almost trip on a rug.

Something like dread twisted in her stomach. 'Merlin,' she whispered. 'Maybe that's it. That's why he . . .'

She imagined that it would be disconcerting for anyone to imagine what she'd just had: her pre-pubescent self, transformed. If she aged like her mother, she would mix in just fine with her peers, with Harry and Ron, have that youthful charm; but her father grew grey-haired in his mid-twenties. It was a veritable coin toss. Perhaps it was vain of her to think this way, but the aesthetics of her choices mattered too – more so now that she was constantly confronted and conscious of her body. How long did she have left in this state? How much longer would she grip at her chest, her hips, wonder whether a millimetre of bone or flesh had shifted in the night? When womanhood came, would she be happy with herself? Would she be short and soft like Molly Weasley or grow statuesque like Madame Sinistra?

'Will I grow into my teeth?' she wondered aloud.

She curbed these thoughts and went back to her test and began earnestly researching Arithmancy, hoping she had at least something to show the Professor when he returned, praying that it distracted her.

Hermione's father had likened Arithmancy to maths at first, and then read a passage on Destiny detailing 'perfect' 0s and 'deceived' 8s and the 'freed' 9 and gave up the comparison entirely. 'This is just metaphor!' he exclaimed. 'Yes,' Hermione had said, and explained as best she could the highly individualised nature of this Master Arithmancer's philosophy of Numerology, and by the time she was finished her father—certainly the most intelligent muggle she knew—was no wiser than he'd been at the beginning. Any attempts to explain since were only met with an increasingly heightened level of exasperation on both their parts. Today she could understand that feeling acutely.

There was a reason Retrospective Arithmancy was taught in the very last two weeks of Advance Arithmancy Studies, and it was because it was simply so bloody difficult to understand without years of prior scholarship, picking apart every other aspect of its nature – or so Hermione figured when she opened a book and could have been holding it upside down for all she understood. In the end, she had floated down every single volume in Snape's library that pertained to the subject, and was cross-checking between several books and all their respective Numerology and logic matrixes painstakingly copied on swathes of parchment. Given that there was only a smattering of the Professor's spiky handwriting in the margins, she assumed he had very little interest (dare she say, understanding?) – the rows of question marks, a simple 'what?', which often made her laugh aloud, seemed to make her think so.

After a few hours at this, reading and re-reading, Hermione wound up her research for the afternoon. Thankfully, she'd discovered the right theories, devised and conjured what she hoped was the proper matrix, fed in the constant—herself, past and current—and the two main variables: the Headmaster and Harry. Her life, ever since stepping foot on the Hogwarts Express, had been revolving around the two like a satellite. And what she saw, in pulsing streams of magic, was an effort to paint the past few months. Thinking of the more current events, she added the equations for Ron and for Sirius—who's line spun between all of theirs but was now intimately connected with Harry's—and Peter Pettigrew, who similarly orbited Ron before veering on it's own path after a brief encounter with all of theirs'. She added Professors Trelawny, Snape, and Lupin, and saw with great clarity the bundle of interactions she knew were the events just before the summer, and then a materialising and looping of the two lines—herself and Harry—orbiting the event, depicting when they went back in time to save Buckbeak and Sirius. She did not know yet how to add the essence of magical creatures into the matrix, but she supposed if she did, she might have seen a line for Buckbeak blinking in and out of existence.

Whereas Arithmancy that made attempts at clairvoyance tended to breed results and matrixes that were as ever-changing as one's whims, there was a solemn and fixed quality to these lines that appealed to Hermione's nature; else, she would not be able to keep a track of all her separate lines interacting with the others, with other events, all fluting and twisting into one constant that was herself in the present moment. Professor Snape's line, a forest green, pulsed strong and parallel to her own, growing ever closer. With all these in place, and as she was about to spell in the stabilisers, she heard Professor Snape clicking shut the front door, and she saw his line almost connect with her own and remain there, as if it were waiting for some change.

'I have returned,' he said, entering the room, and finding himself standing right at the nexus point where his, Hermione's, and Professor Dumbledore's lines came together a few days ago, as close as they could be without touching, but beat and glowed strongly, indicating just how important that moment was. 'What is this?' he said lowly, staring around the room. 'A matrix?'

'Yes,' she said, 'these are all significant occurrences in my life between the beginning of this year and now. The first nexus point'—she gestured over her shoulder—'is when Professor Trelawny delivered her new prophecy to Harry.'

Snape nodded. 'Is it . . . _stable_?' he asked, eyeing his and Hermione's twined lines, the bulbs of light where they crossed and recrossed in these past few days.

'Of course. Yes,' she said, 'I was about to cement it in place and begin on the equations for the future. Did you want to add in anybody else?'

'Just the Dark Lord, if he's not already here,' he said.

Hermione nodded and spelled as such, feeling a little perturbed of not having thought of it earlier. Nothing happened, really, until a wispy sliver of crimson light appeared and trapped itself in Harry's glow. 'How odd . . .' she said, walking around the room, monitoring the ever-constant closeness between Harry and Voldemort, tracking them to where they fizzled out in the corner of the room. Hermione returned to the moment she and Harry used the Time-Turner; there he was, Lord Voldemort, ever-present. 'This can't . . . I would say this is incorrect, Professor but—'

'I don't know much about Retrospective Arithmancy, Miss Granger, but I know it does not lie,' he finished, arms folded, brows drawn, 'not when the caster's themselves is placed as constant.'

'What I don't understand,' she said, 'is why I am seeing it.'

'Well, what you see is what the main variables know at the precise moment they are added, yes? Who are they?'

'Harry and Professor Dumbledore.' As she spoke, she waved her wand and plucked Harry out of the equation, and as she did so Voldemort disappeared too. 'But that's not possible!' she said, feeling weak-kneed and perching on her desk. 'Harry doesn't _know_ that! He has no clue that Voldemort is stalking his every mood. He tells me everything, Professor. _Everything_.' The stable nature of the matrix was proof – had there been something he was keeping from her, it would have disrupted the whole thing.

'I don't doubt that, Miss Granger,' he said, voice thick with innuendo.

Hermione frowned at him and righted the matrix, then studied it once more before removing Professor Dumbledore. And as she did so, the red line of Voldemort fizzled out of existence once again, but Harry's remained.

'I don't know what I've just seen,' he said slowly. Professor Snape quietly, back leaning against the door, looked just as winded and exhausted as she.

'I don't . . .' and then, almost at once, and to her horror, she understood completely. 'Professor Dumbledore knows that Harry's being stalked by Voldemort and he is doing nothing.' For a moment Snape's brows draw and eyes screw close, and then he looked at her with so much fury she didn't know whether it was directed at her or what she'd said. 'And what are these lines, really Professor? They're not simply lives, are they? And nor are they memories or essences. They are our souls. You may have—look!' she stepped into the magic of the matrix and pointed at where the lines all converged, and he moved to her, robes gently billowing behind. 'If I just expand this point,' she said, jabbing her wand, 'Pettigrew's line is the lavender. Look how it blends with Harry's for a moment. That is where Harry saves him from certain death at the hands of Sirius and Professor Lupin; that act of mercy incurs a Life Debt, and Pettigrew's soul has acknowledged it: that is why they fuse and part. And later, look'—she pointed at where her own, the Professor, and Harry and Ron, all converge in one throbbing ball of light—'do you know what this is?'

He looked straight into her eyes and did not say a thing. 'This,' she said gently, 'is where you stepped in front of us . . . when you put yourself between Professor Lupin and—'

'Yes, yes. All three of you owe me your lives,' he said quickly, waving her off, 'your souls have acknowledged it. So, at every point where one's very soul is intrinsically moved, there is direct contact.' Over her shoulder she saw Harry and Sirius meet where Harry cast the _Patronus_. 'So, spell back Dumbledore and the Dark Lord's soul Miss Granger.'

A gesture of her wand, and once again a whisp of smoke-like magic and Voldemort was again burrowed into Harry's soul. She swallowed. 'They're . . . What the magic tells us is that Voldemort's soul is burrowed into Harry's, and the Headmaster knows and is keeping this from everyone . . . not even Harry is aware. However, it would go against everything I know of magic if I was to believe that two complete souls can inhabit one body, Professor. I don't think they can. I don't think anyone can bear that, nor their magic withstand it. So, I can only deduce that it's a fragment – weak, far weaker than that _thing_ growing behind Quirrell's head in first year . . . What do you think?'

Severus walked over to the sofa and sat down. 'Soul magic is _the_ Darkest Art, Miss Granger, nothing escapes that shade. Most of the literature on that subject is hidden away in family grimoires, or, if we're to think cynically once more, Ministry-controlled. The conclusion you've drawn, based on your limited knowledge, is . . . highly plausible. You can run the equations if you like. But there's one inescapable fact that perhaps your willingly not registering, Miss Granger, and it's simply that Harry Potter must die.'


	8. Tergio

* * *

**CHAPTER EIGHT**

**TERGIO**

* * *

  
Since spelling away the matrix, it had been two long weeks, and it had been two long weeks of Hermione seeing Professor Snape at dinner and at the quick exchange of a cup of tea in the morning; and, really, all that was exchanged was the very minimum of words: enough to get by, enough to convey that nothing was out of the ordinary, or, given the realisation that they were all but fumbling in the dark, at the behest of the Headmaster's fancies, that they were safe. Beside that, not even his shadow crossed hers.

At first, Hermione thought that the avoidance was down to the intricacies of her magical malnourishment potion: he'd said something about the base itself required 180 alternating clockwise and anti-clockwise turns in a perpetual figure-of-eight movement, that, too, for two whole hours, over four whole days. It would create a healing charm at the heart of the potion to endow each of the constituent parts with greater power. However, when arriving at the end of the second week, and fifty tiny glass ampules of the lavender potion appeared at her desk, perfuming the room with the scent of roasted sesame seeds and honey, and they came paired with a note to take once a day beginning the following, that they would make her feel famished, he said, that she should expect the "restoration of her normal functions"; when, still, even after all of this, Snape woke, made her tea, and fled to the potions lab without a word, Hermione figured it was something more serious than the strenuous minding of potions that kept him.

'Why can't he bear to be around me?' she thought. 'What have I done?'

Surely this wasn't all down to the man realising her best friend harboured, unknowingly, a fragment of Lord Voldemort's soul? They had not spoken on that fact since its discovery, because, over the two weeks, Snape had not step foot in the library whilst she was there, conducting her research. It's as if he thought he may walk in on another paradigm shift. Though, often in the dead of night, she would wake to the creaking of the floorboards above her, or hear him moving up and down the stairs that lead up to the second floor. Snape, for some reason that remained utterly illusive, chose to converse another way.

Hermione would wake, and sometime later trudge upstairs with the tea he'd brewed her, only to find slips of parchment with further references she should look at during the day, steering her otherwise aimless reading. Even this was done begrudgingly—that she knew from the way he dug his quill into the sheet; three years of being his student had afforded her that much knowledge of his penmanship.

Nevertheless, after dinner that night, after she had consumed the first greasy dose of the potion before bed, Hermione woke in the small hours of the morning, with a crackle of magic behind her navel twisting and twisting south. She winced at the dull burn it stirred, fostered with no sign of tapering off. 'Ow,' she said. 'Ow.' Her's instincts had her darting to the bathroom – perhaps it was just that Snape's fish pie had not agreed with her?

Only, she got there, pulled down her baby pink knickers, to discover the gusset smeared with a gummy brown mucous.

Hermione's ears rang with a monotone roar, and she could see her chest juddering with every heartbeat; her breast—which she'd noticed, thankfully, growing larger by the day—were sore and stiff at the nipple; the frilly edge of her camisole shaky. When she got up and wiped herself, her stomach turned at the sour stench of it, the soreness and damp of it, the abject grisliness of the fresh, ruby blood soaking into the rough tissue and onto her fingers.

'Why did I not think to warn myself?' she whispered to herself, astounded, flushing the loo. 'Is this what he meant?' she thought, aiming an _Tergio_ at her underwear, siphoning off the obscene smear, and then aiming one cold, lime-scented flash below the waist. 'Is this what he meant by my normal functions returning?' She washed her hands, watching in fascination how the blood stuck to the sides of the sink for the moment before giving in.

Because she was unprepared for the situation entirely, she found herself sleeping for a few hours with her underwear lined with several sheets of the utterly bog-standard one-ply paper – she winced at the way it rubbed against her when she moved. Try as she did, she could not transfigure the tissue into anything even remotely resembling a sanitary towel; though her magic could cope with a basic cleaning spell, it felt as if it was at a rolling boil, that every tile and brick in that pristine bathroom would disintegrate. Even as a child; later, even, possessed with the sort of fury that gripped her from time to time, she had never experienced her magic so capricious and wayward.

Waking and peeking into her pants, she discovered there was something decidedly more blood than mucous on the tissue, and she'd bled through that too. So, more _Tergio_ s, more lining her underwear with tissue paper. Once done, Hermione splashed her face with water, scrubbed at the blood around her nails. She cursed herself— _brightest witch of her age_ —for not knowing _what to do_. And where, to her outrage, were the readily available sanitary towels in the girl's bathrooms at Hogwarts? In Hogsmeade? They were an entirely ordinary sight in public toilets all around muggle Britain. What did witches do when they menstruated? What did they do when they came on in public?

Despite Lavender Brown getting her period this year, Hermione was certain she was the only one in her whole year – the older girls had never even given a hint as to _this_ happening to them with some regularity. Even Lavender was quiet and vague with the details – not that Hermione had sought her out and interrogated her. It, of course, was no secret that Hermione felt a dearth of both female friends and social skills; maybe if she had tried a little harder with them, she wouldn't be suffering this humiliation. This was another muggleborn failing, a failing no amount of Time-Turning had prepared her for.

Of course, there was no way Snape could have known what his potion would do to her. None at all. Hermione wasn't sure there was any relation between the two events either. 'But there must be,' she thought, 'there simply must.' Still, when he handed her tea later that morning, and moved to dash down to his laboratory, she could not help but to say something, her mortification be damned. Hermione could survive much on her own, could access a whole wellspring of Gryffindor nerve, but this was beyond her.

'Will you wait?' she said, her traitorous voice already breaking. 'Please, Professor?'

'What is it?' he asked, back still turned; in the morning light, she could see his vest clearly through his white broadshirt, could see the dark hair darkening his armpit.

'I think . . . I think I might need to go to a pharmacy,' she stuttered. Her ears were ringing again, and even as she stood perfectly still, she could feel the sting of the loo roll chaffing against the innermost part of her thighs. 'It's sort of an emergency,' she said.

' _What_ is _sort of_ an emergency?' he asked her quickly, turning, his entire face twisted into a picture of perplexity.

'The potion—.' She jumped when he set the cup down roughly, and now his hands looked so awkward, she thought, hanging there, not making themselves useful, eyes wary. 'I can't be sure, but I think I'm suffering some sort of side-effect,' she said.

'Tell me your symptoms,' he sighed, 'and I'll brew you an antidote and reformulate.'

She blinked fast and felt as if he had pushed a handful of Knuts down her throat. An antidote would do nothing for her, not now.

All Hermione wanted was to be having this conversation with her mother, her mother Jean Granger, a practical woman, who kept the bathroom cupboard stocked with all manner and variety of sanitary products – though she had sworn she'd always worn a tampon, even as a teenager when such things were considered tasteless and morally abhorrent. After their brief puberty talk last summer, Jean had told Hermione to simply owl her if this ever happened to her at Hogwarts: she would send her whatever she needed. Hermione did not want to speak about the sorry state of her vagina to the bloody Potions Master of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Hermione, at the thought of it all, burst into tears.

'Granger, what . . . ?' she heard, and then a shuffle of steps, a heavy sigh, and stiff hand settling on her shoulder. 'Granger,' she heard, thinking that he sounded as horrified as she felt. 'Why this melodrama?'

'I want to go home,' she whispered.

'Don't be such a child,' he chided. 'Tell _me_ what's wrong. _I_ am here, Miss Granger.'

'I want my mum!' she insisted, knowing just how idiotic she sounded, crying for her mum when she was supposed to be working on a way to potentially save Wizarding Britain. She would regret this, this shameless weakness. This was why she would never be placed in Slytherin – not her mudblood status, but this, this capitulation to her emotions. 'Please, sir,' she said, all the while feeling this new heat in her core, pooling all around her, her magic more volatile than she'd ever known it, threatening to burst out of her skin like a solar flare.

And as he did in the garden that day, when she had all but lost her mind, he rubbed her back in long light stokes. He smelled of his herbal soap, his herbal soap that she daren't use. 'If you think it's the potion's doing,' he said, 'you need to tell me quickly. Your mum is useless here.'

She pressed a fist to her mouth, her brain begging her to be quiet, coughing through the tears. And then she felt, maybe for the first time in her whole life, an acute and bodily awareness of her vagina, as real as the hand in front of her mouth. Before today, it had always felt like some comfortably benign and unfeeling part of her: as passé as an appendix. ' _Shit_ ,' she hissed, feeling the tissues chafe, his damned one-ply tissue. 'Shit, shit, shit.'

'Granger?' he said, alarmed. 'Is it your lungs?'

'No, Sir, no. I think it's like you said,' she said.

'What are y . . . ?'

She swiped at her eyes, and gripped the counter with a hand to steady herself; he held her shoulder in his grip. 'It'll seem like such an overreaction to you,' she began, 'but my magic is _wrong_. And I think I've started to . . . _I've started_ ,' she said, hoping that he understood.

He tugged her sharply to face him, and suddenly there were two hands around cheeks. With his thumbs below her chin, he pushed her jaw up. 'Look at me,' he said. She found his expression wild and as panicked as she felt, his eyes bottomless. 'Miss Granger, are you telling me you've started to _menstruate_?'

'Yes,' she sobbed.

'Are you certain?'

She bobbed her head once and tried to look at anything but his eyes. 'There's blood,' she whispered. 'There's suddenly a lot of b-blood.'

He stepped back, and lashed out his wand from his sleeve, preforming a spell upon her, teeth gnashing. Hermione, even in her delirium, recognised the silvery light as medically diagnostic, felt it worm and mingle with that restless magic at her core, and then pulse forward, emerging between them. The magic took the shape of ticking numbers that he observed with increasing anger.

Hermione Granger was born on the 19th September 1979; today's date was the 16th July 1994; if she'd not tampered in Time, she would be fourteen, turning fifteen in September. Her estimates were her estimates: they were reasonable, she thought, with an average of two Turns, she had shifted back her birthday by twelve months or so; that she would be sixteen . . . _or so_.

What Hermione did not expect was Professor Snape to display, in the unblemished precision and power of his magic, that she had overshot sixteen by _months_ ; that she, born as she was in 1979, would not turn seventeen 1996, but somewhere in the middle of November _this_ year!

The spell was undeniable: today, stood bleeding in Severus Snape's Manchester kitchen, she was sixteen years, seven months, and three days old. In the ten months she'd spent at Hogwarts, Hermione had aged almost—

' _You stupid fucking girl_ ,' he raged, cancelling the spell with a slash of his wand and stowing it away. 'You absolute _dunderhead_ , Granger. Is it any wonder!'

'I've aged more than two and half years?' she said to herself, feeling at the stifling touch of his magic in the space between them, sensing her own threaten to burst forth. 'In _ten_ months? That's . . . I can't even—'

'You told me,' he accused, her face back in his grip, his fingertips digging into her cheeks. 'You told me _ten_ additional hours a day! This is _twenty-one_ months Turned Time. Twenty-one _months_! Do you know how many hours that is? I cannot even _fathom_ how many complete rotations of that godforsaken device th—'

'Professor,' she said, shivering at his cold touch, his violence. 'I . . . I thought I—.'

'Gryffindor recklessness! _Ministry-sanctioned_ recklessness! They should have known better than to trust you.'

'Professor!'

He shook his head in disbelief, and then, in a gesture that belied his fury, swiped his fingers over the wet apples of her cheek. 'You could have died, Miss Granger. You could have died a thousand times, across every conceivable moment in time. You could have been ripped into dust, and then where would we have searched for you, Miss Granger? Tell me! How could we have brought you back?'

For a moment, she could not understand whether it was pain or desire or her magic thrashing about between her hips, winding her. She cried out, and felt, to her utter horror, a nauseating dampness flood between her legs, bubbling in front. 'Oh my god,' she thought. 'Oh my god,' she said, her knees buckling.

He crouched with her on the floor, unable to catch her as she fell, fell like a sock off the washing line. 'When did this begin?'

'Early this morning,' she said, gasping for breath. 'About four o'clock. I don't have anything on me to deal with it. I thought I would go back and warn mys—'

'Do you still dare to speak to me of _Time_?' he spat. 'Tell me, how is your magic?'

'It feels _odd_ ,' she said, 'like any second now I'll snap.'

'You should have told me right away,' he said.

'I didn't kn—. We haven't been—'

'You should have told me, nonetheless!'

'It shouldn't be like this,' she said. 'My mum—'

'Use your brain! She is a muggle,' he said. 'You're a magical being. You've an altered biology.'

'That doesn't make any sense to me. I didn't know. _I_ should have been told!' she cried, cringing at the feel of the blood seep into the seat of her pyjama bottoms. ' _Why was I not told?_ I'm . . .'

'You may almost be _seventeen,_ you foolish girl, but this is still far too soon,' he said. 'It usually happens after you graduate Hogwarts, when you're approaching nineteen.'

She shook her head. 'Lavender Brown told us she—'

He scoffed. 'You're supposed to be an intelligent witch, Miss Granger. It does not bode well that you allow yourself to be led by the little finger, not least by the likes of the fourteen-year-old Brown,' he said. 'Do you not know? She is as muggleborn as you are.'

'And am I supposed to just continue soiling my clothes in the meantime?' she seethed, not even wanting to think about that _bimbo_ Lavender Brown—she'd do that another time, she was sure—because Hermione was certain she was dripping down her thighs; the blood hot, collecting at the back of her knee. She tried to clamp herself shut to suppress the flow, but whatever muscle she was endeavouring to operate now was far too weak, and the more she tried the more blood she let go on the failed attempt.

At her words, his cheeks grew pink. 'Obviously not,' he said, sobering up.

'Then _what_ do I _do_? I need a sanitary towel, anything.'

He shifted his weight to support her. 'Yes, yes, I'll get you them. But first, we need to collect the First Blood,' he said.

She looked at him aghast, something thick rushing out of her at the shock. ' _The what?_ '

'As much as it no doubt pains you, you will have to trust my word on this, Granger. At this current moment in time, you are producing an incredibly powerful magical element – you will have cause to use it throughout your life, and, understandably, it's an uncommonly rare thing to come by it in your local apothecary, the uterine lining even more so . . . I'm going to apparate us directly to the bathroom,' he said. 'Okay? Hold on.'

Hermione did not have a second to respond, because he was tugging out his wand one moment and apparating the next. And what followed was a moment in time that Hermione wouldn't ever forget . . .

The Side-Along rent her, rent her in a hundred different directions as was its wont. Hermione's magic, a heady monsoon, forced more blood from her, and when she materialised in the bathroom with Snape beside her, she found the tiles around her showered, wet with red.

Snape's hand came and pressed against her mouth, the pale, almost translucent skin of his face and neck splattered with her blood, his thick dark brows in stark contrast. 'Do not worry yourself about it for an instant,' he said, as if he was discussing something as mundane as the weather. 'Do not strain yourself further. It does not matter. It is only blood. It's only a little blood. Shush, Miss Granger, shh . . .'

But then he tucked a stray, curly lock of her hair behind her ear, and the fingers that came away to now be pressed across her lips, to quell her silent screams, were caked with blood. Hermione gagged, and Hermione retched before him. She screamed a noise that felt wholly severed from her, a scream for the taste of herself on her tongue, the scent of herself in her nose. Hermione tried to crawl away and out of his grip but he kept her there. And while she was not in abject pain, the awfulness of it, the horror of what she was being subjected to by Fate on this morning, ruined her. And in her screams, she caught sight of the bathroom.

It was like someone had decided to run a bath of blood and walk away, or, she imagined, interrupted a Death Eater revel mid-slaughter. Now she could not bear to linger any longer on the smell, the taste; she couldn't bear to think on Snape's once pristine white shirt, the state of his collar and cuffs, why the ends of his hair dripped. She dreaded to imagine the sight of herself.

Her mother had said it was typical to lose a couple of tablespoons of blood over the course of one's period – but even that was when you were a 'seasoned menstruator' as she'd said. In the beginning, she'd been told to expect infrequency, thimblefuls, slight quantities, nothing to worry about.

'What is this?' she thought.

'Compose yourself,' he said, 'please, Granger. You need to calm down.' And then, with a sigh: ' _Tergio_ ,' he said. _'Tergio. Tergio. Tergio_.' It was uncommon to hear him speak such basic spells. ' _Tergio_ ,' he said, the spell from his lips a mantra. ' _Tergio_. _Tergio._ ' She lost track of the number of times he aimed the spell at her. But soon the bathroom smelled citrus clean, but it was there, the smell, lingering on her tongue like the Mandrake Draught. 'On your feet. Come on, girl. On your feet for me. Yes. Yes, that's it.'

A rag-doll, she could do nothing but listen and do as he bid, the picture of the ruined bathroom still before her eyes.

He sat her on the toilet, and she was vaguely aware of a hesitancy before prickly magic stripped her of all her lower garments, something cool and stiff like glass emerging in the space between the water in the bowl and herself, and that same cool thing, round and smooth-edged, pressing against the sensitive flesh she had never given a great deal of thought to before today.

Hermione folded over herself, trying to hide her thighs and the shadow between them with her arms, stretching the inflexible jumper over her knees. Then, she stared up at him, she stared at his unreadable, stoic face.

Snape snapped a square of loo roll from the holder and transfigured a thick, large woollen blanket from it, spread it over her shoulders and around her legs. He stepped back, sat himself barely a meter away, at her feet, on the hard floor, holding his head in his hands, his elbows resting on his bowed knees.

'Bear down,' he said quietly. 'When you feel you must . . . or can . . . bear down.'

Hermione nodded, attempting it, and then winced at the wet, noisy collision of an unnerving amount of blood hitting the bottom of whatever he'd situated below her, and the sound ricocheting around the room, louder than the rain that battered the windowpane.

Snape's head snapped up and now he stared at her.'The apparition was a grave mistake,' he said. 'I should have carried you up. I apologise. All that blood could have been preserved if I were more careful, _if I was just thinking_ . . .'

'It's fine,' she said, her voice hoarse. 'It's not fine,' she thought, her teeth now chattering from the chill that exuded in from the window behind her, and all the adrenaline from the past few minutes—had it only been a few minutes? She'd no idea. Today Time was the sight of watching Harry in one of his dreadful moods, buttering a slice of toast in the morning, and the butter cold and the bread cold, and the knife puncturing the bread over and over. Today she was the toast, and Time the butterknife forcing her to relinquish everything, even her body. 'You don't need to apologise,' she said, her mind some way away from her body. 'Yes, you do,' she thought. 'Can you cast a warming charm?' she asked, and then, surrendering any semblance of shame: 'And something to mask the scent and the sound?' She was already at rock-bottom, where else was there to go? 'I can't stomach it.'

Three knotty gestures of his wand later and he said, 'You will be passing _a lot_ of blood in these coming seventy-two hours, and then it will stop dead, and all will return to normal. You will be passing tissue, too, as you should know. I will be separating the solid matter from the blood and preserving both. Do not be alarmed. It is normal. Whatever happened here and will happen here is normal and—'

'It's not to me,' she said, voice rising, cutting him off. 'It's absolutely not normal to me! This is a horror show. This is _foul_ magic, and you're telling me it's normal?' And as she spoke she felt it turn over in her gut, more alert and more knowing than ever – how had her magic become so much like a familiar? 'I feel . . . _Dark_ ,' she said, tearing up. 'Not like me at all. I don't like it. I don't like it. This is not me.'

To her surprise he reached out and rested a hand on her knee. 'Is he _comforting_ me?' she thought. 'I sense it in the air,' he murmured, and then withdrew, tucking his wand back into his clean sleeve. 'Your magic is heady and wild.'

'What does that _mean_?' she asked in fury, giving way to more blood.

'It means your magic has an affinity with the Dark,' he said, sharply, his tone matching her own, though his eyes were tired. 'Just as mine, just as many of the professors who have taught you do, and just as the Headmaster, so-called Commander of the Light. Nothing more. Just an affinity. You don't need to think on it, much less act on it.'

'We are never told,' she said, and then, to distract from the bleb of blood gathering at the opening: 'We are never told our magic can do _that_. That my body will do _this . . ._ Have you read the Gerard Rosier book, _Minus the Mudblood, Minus the Muggle_?'

Something like alarm graced his features but like with so many of his expressions it was gone before she could study it. 'And you want to say that your affinity with the Dark is _unexpected_? Yes, yes I have.'

'The original?'

'Obviously.'

'And do you agree? Agree with his conclusion, that is, Professor?'

'That the Ministry should rob the muggleborn cradle and pawn off their children to desperate wizards and witches?' he asked, his disdain clear. 'Categorically no.'

'I suppose that's easy for you to say,' she said, bearing down like he'd said, and then gasping into her lap at the pain. 'Shit,' she whimpered, bringing the blanket tighter around her. She looked to Snape and while he was pink-cheeked, he wound a hand around her ankle, radiating a warming, healing magic.

'You have a profane mouth,' he said, 'it is quite unbecoming of a young witch.'

Hermione laughed loudly: the sound was hysterical even to her own ears. 'If I knew – if I had watched my witch mother go through this – I would have been prepared. Even if there was some class, I could have taken in First Year, or some handbook given to my parents and I. Muggleborns are at a constant disadvantage and nobody cares! And if the purebloods do care, they seem to want to eradicate us entirely and rid _themselves_ of the problem! I will never recover from this, Professor Snape. I know I won't. I can still see you cov—'

'And I you,' he said, tightening his hand, his magic searing in its intensity. 'But that trauma is not the fault of the Ministry or the School – that is my fault,' he said. 'I admit that. I failed to consider the effects of free-flowing liquids in apparition. I have apologised.'

'I am sitting on a toilet,' she whispered, 'with _something_ pressed up against me collecting my menstrual matter. _That_ is the most traumatic thing, and would have been enough to scar me.'

He sighed and looked away, pulling his hands away from her body, and crossing his arms. 'I don't know what you expect me to say, Miss Granger. For the entire first semester of NEWTs, I teach the students blood, fertility, and love potions— _every_ NEWT subject covers magical menstruation in some form.'

'Even Ghoul Studies?' she asked.

'Especially Ghoul Studies,' he said, a dark humour colouring his tone. 'First Blood is a key component in many exorcisms spells and expulsion wards, and the uterine lining is awful in its power to summon all manner of Dark creatures. How much you're willing to collect of the two is entirely up to you, though I would advise only collecting from the first few hours only as the magical properties of the blood and flesh wane considerably; it should be more than you'll ever need – most occasions that require it only ask for a drop or two.'

She wiped at her tears. 'I'm sure you're right, but, still, don't you think it's irresponsible, Professor? For us to reach our _seventh year_ at Hogwarts and then be told about something that's this important and intimately concerned with us and our magic? That, too, as part of some tangentially-related subject's curriculum? What happens to all those students who don't make it to NEWT Potions? Where—'

'Miss Granger,' he said, cutting through her tirade mid-flow. 'Please don't presume to lecture me. Every notion that has entered that brain of yours just now is one I've had and heard from the moment I've taught Potions. Simply, we cannot trust students not to kill one another – surely that's something even you understand? There are books. There are potioneers and apothecaries outside of Hogwarts one can utilise, there are whole divisions of Gringotts and the Ministry dedicated to enacting blood-wards on properties. Frankly, what this comes down to, is that the grownups do not trust underage witches and wizards to behave themselves with magic so potent – can you blame them?' He threw up his arms, and rested his head against the tile, closing his eyes. 'Look at what you and your friends get up to, given half the chance.'

Hermione gritted her teeth. 'This . . . it's just mortifying,' she said, her voice echoing in the tiled bathroom. 'I'm sorry that I—'

'What is it you suppose you've done?'

She swallowed. 'This is intimate, Professor, and certainly not something you agreed to do for the Headmaster when you said you'd take me in for the summer.'

He opened his eyes and levelled her with his best glare. 'You are indeed a muggleborn witch,' he said, 'so you're understandably puzzled, and will remain as such for some time. But this is not _just_ a period like your mother or grandmother may have had, remove that notion from your overworked mind. This is your First Blood. When you return to Hogwarts, it's incredibly likely that your fellow students will sense that something's changed – or at least their magic will – I know I have, and it's hardly been an hour.

'This is a significant magical occasion,' he said, 'the most significant in your life bar your admission to Hogwarts.' He paused, and she saw something in his jaw and temple twitch. 'Though you've little choice in the matter, I'm humbled to be here, and my being here means this is done properly and clinically . . . The purebloods throw balls, you know,' he added, in a way that was almost teasing.

'To celebrate _what_?' she asked, appalled.

'Simply, from this point forward,' he said, 'you're considered a mature witch – though you can buy property, apply for a secondary wand, a broom and apparition licence, all at the age of seventeen. There is something essential and inner that changes irrevocably at First Blood, and you will notice that soon enough . . . Before the second bleed, in families with antiquated traditions, there's a marriage contract already drawn up.'

'Within a month!' she yelled, and felt the embarrassment of blood leaving her and meeting more blood, and that far closer to her intimate area than she realised. She cried out.

'You're thinking mug—. What is it?' he asked, pushing himself up on to his knees before her, his hands resting heavily on her knees. 'Is there something wrong?'

She could not meet his eye. 'I think . . . I think whatever you have below me is full.'

'Already?' he said, eyes wide. 'It's hardly been twenty minutes!'

'It is full,' she said, sure she blushed over her whole body then – though she was surprised she'd any blood left for such aesthetic purposes. 'I am sure.'

He gave her a grim twist of his lips, and removed his hands from her person and retrieved his wand. With his brow furrowed, he asked, 'Can you rise to your feet for a moment?'

Hermione did as Snape asked, making sure to keep the blanket tight around her to protect whatever modesty remained, but to her utter degradation, a huge, wide-bottomed flask, with a stem and top like a cocktail glass floated from behind her and settled between them – and then, with another wave of his wand, there was an identical flask in the bowl of the toilet again, and she was being tugged down to sit over it by the Professor.

Snape spent the next few moments summoning a shallow petri dish from his lab, carefully separating the dark, gelatinous lining from the blood, which she watched with a sick fascination. He whispered a long rhythmic incantation over the flask and dish which she recognised as a sophisticated preservation spell detailed in _Moste Potent Potions_. When Snape was done, he removed both vessels from the room with another wave of his wand, settling back and leaned against the wall, taking in deep gasping breaths.

'What's the matter?' she said, already afraid of his answer.

He shot her a look, and then stared at the tiles. 'Nothing. The magical discharge is potent, is all,' he said. 'As a man, I can readily sense its presence, though that will wane in a day or so.'

She gulped. 'Like pheromones?'

'You are a remarkable witch,' he said, startling her with his non sequitur. 'Whether you've been properly socialised to pureblood standards or not. You did not need to be a changeling of all Merlinforsaken things to succeed in this world.'

She smiled at him. 'Thank you for saying that, Sir. I don't agree, but thank you.'

He glowered at her. 'Do not misconstrue what I have said as a compliment. It is a fact. Which part is not to your liking?'

'I have spent . . .' she cleared her throat, feeling the tears come again. 'I have spent so many hours, so much Turned Time, trying to make up for the disadvantage of my birth. I have read and read. Hundreds of books, Professor, in this past year alone. It is an inescapable fact that I will not overcome this handicap. There are some things you cannot learn in a book – I know that now – no matter how hard you try; it will only take one thing for it to all come tumbling down. There are differences I cannot make up; I am remarkable only in the sense that I have almost killed myself in the attempt.'

'Then we shall have to agree to disagree, Miss Granger,' he sighed, and got to his feet. 'Would you like that cup of tea?'

She wiped away her tears. 'Yes, please, Professor.'

* * *

A handful of hours later, near noon, Hermione watched Snape send the third flask of blood and another petri dish full of lining away, and he settled once again against the wall, his legs outstretched before him, struggling for breath. Snape's wand lay in his hands, limp.

Hermione felt as tired as he seemed, her vision swimming with floaters like Cornish Pixies, and her magic still waging a battle within her, pushing her blood forward, ever-forward. 'Heal me,' she mentally asked it, and 'I can't believe we have different genes!' she said, rubbing her eyes, picking up where their last argument had left off. 'I am as human as—'

'No, you're not,' he said, rubbing at his own eyes with one hand. 'You are categorically not. Wizarding society is far more difficult for muggleborn witches to adapt to, I am somewhat sympathetic to that, but what I'm not sympathetic to is this churlish whim you're exercising! You are an utterly different _species_ of human – you have magic, for Merlin's sake! You've a biology and chemistry that has to survive that.

'You even know of witches and wizards living for almost 200 years – humans are simply not able to do that. Leanora Abbott, the trolley witch on the Hogwarts Express, was born in 1826 – she celebrated turning 153 this spring – does she look a day over sixty? Sixty-five? You've read _Hogwarts: A History_ several times, no doubt. Why is this so difficult you to fathom?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know. I don't know. I suppose because it's not a concept, _it's my body_ , and I didn't understand my body at all before,' she said, 'and I don't understand what it's doing now. I think . . . I think I've just thought of myself as fourteen for far too long, enough that there's a dissonance.' He nodded. 'But I'm almost seventeen now, and _still_ you're telling me it's too soon and it'll be infrequent? It won't be once every month?'

'I'll show you a book or two upstairs you can read,' he said, narrowing his eyes at her with something she thought was akin to fondness. 'But simply, no, nowhere near to once a month. You are born with far fewer eggs – estimated, in amount, to be a third of your muggle mother's. By the time you reach your majority, less than fifty-thousand remain. Menstruation, usually four times a year, lasts for two or three days,' he said, startling her. 'Your magic is volatile because it's attempting to both expel the blood as quickly as possible and heal at once – yours is attempting the gargantuan task of mending the damage to your core too, accelerated by the potion I brewed. When your course of potions is done, you can take something to stop the bleeds - unlike the muggle varieties, there are no adverse consequences you need to worry about – potioneers have had the recipe perfected for over a millennium. If you'd like, I can brew and teach you it; I have all other ingredients, and it will only require a pin-drop of this blood. You should take it once every year.'

'Please,' she said, 'if you could.' Hermione felt blood well at her opening and bared down like he'd told her, flinching – he shifted and curled a hand around her ankle again, and she felt the stirring of his magic radiating through her skin, but it did nothing to help the bone-numbing tiredness gripping her.

He inclined his head. 'As for why this happened so soon? We can only speculate. I'm inclined to believe it's because of your Time exposure,' he said. 'We saw the state of your magical core. It's no great leap to assume it's a biological and magical response to a life-threatening circumstance, and the shock of a new and powerful potion in the system. Our bodies are often intuitive like this, as you know. When the Dark Lord rose the first time, it seemed as if every other week a pureblood house held a ball for their daughter – the dormitories at Hogwarts are twice as larger than when I was a student. Magic is sentient, Miss Granger, it knows when it's under threat.'

She wanted to ask something, especially now knowing that whatever she knew and expected about herself may as well be a fiction. 'Professor,' she said, 'when we arrived here, you accused me of being _pregnant_ but . . . ?'

'There have been . . . _incidents_ with other muggleborns,' he said carefully, slow, 'who have prematurely menstruated, as you have, come into their majority, and thought it not much out of the ordinary. They've slapped a sanitary towel on their knickers and forgone collecting the First Blood, depriving themselves of indispensable protections that would aid them throughout their lives. For the blood purists, these sorts of occurrences can be and have been used as propaganda to show that they cannot be trusted in our world. Sadly, it wasn't a great leap to assume you, in your Gryffindor stubbornness, had naively taken matters into your own hand.'

She tried to not let that smart. She tried to focus instead on how _mad_ it was that she was sat here on the toilet, sans trousers, sans her knickers, and the Professor just a few feet away, and they were speaking about bleeding vaginas – her, sickened, and him in an unsettling reverent tone. Her head swam and vision grew blurry at the edges.

'Is there a male equivalent?' she asked. 'Of coming into one's majority?'

Snape smiled in an indulgent way that was, on every level, alarming. 'No, we are stagnant ponds from the age of seventeen.'

'Right. And what of puberty?'

'What of it?'

'Does it progress on the same, _human_ timeline?'

'It is . . . similar,' he said. 'A much hurried and a far more violent experience for wizards, it usually occurs between their third and fourth year of Hogwarts, or thereabouts. They show all the usual signs. Witches . . . Witches are ever-developing, in the hopes that when the First Blood arrives their bodies are completely ready to bear children in the following season—should they chose to, of course, which, in this century, is almost always not.'

'But mine is not ready,' she said to herself, but in the silence, in this small, tiled room, that did not matter. She knew he'd heard when his breathing stopped.

After a long moment of silence he said, 'There's usually some time for the body and mind to adjust to the changes without dysmorphia . . . You will not have that luxury. The potion I've brewed you will hurry the inevitable developments, but you've no option but to take it. After years of suppressing its nature, your body and magic have realised they needn't wait.'

That thought frightened her immensely – perhaps she _was_ to be a woman overnight like her mother, after all. Hermione thought of her quickly developing breasts; she stared at her thighs, through a small opening of the blanket, saw that they were covered in light down. Between them, past the thatch of curls, she saw a thick, blunt cord of blood leaving her and recoiled at the sight; his hand tightened around her ankle. 'I think I'm done with this one,' she said.

'So soon?'

He let her go and sat back, the two preparing to go through the motions that she, no doubt, would struggle to forget. This time, however, she reached between her legs and fished out the glass flask full of her warm blood, holding it at arm's length and trying not to gag at the sight of the bottom much darker with clots, how it sloshed and clung to the sides . . .

'Thank you,' he said, taking it from her, her hand growing more limp by the second. 'I think we have what we need. Four flasks in 6 hours is praiseworthy and far more than you'll ever need. You will have to travel to Gringotts at some point, and can deposit them in your vault. It is the safest place.'

She shifted uncomfortably at that thought, ears hot and ringing, then said, 'This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me.'

'Worse than Polyjuicing yourself into a cat?' he asked, lips twitching, taking the blood from her, and beginning his wand-waving.

'No,' she sighed, her head swimming. She remembered how she had to be shorn all over by Madam Pomphrey, how she'd coughed up hair for weeks. 'Noth—,' she began, but then noticed the thick, coagulating smear of blood across her forearm from where she'd fished out the collecting apparatus, and Hermione toppled off the toilet, fainting.


	9. Doctor, Doctor

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* * *

**CHAPTER NINE**

**DOCTOR, DOCTOR**

* * *

Waking—before noticing anything about herself, about the state of her magic, her mind, her vagina, countless other things of exponentially decreasing importance—Hermione noticed Professor Snape, stood over her bed, the bright white tip of his ebony wand glowing over her eyes. Then came the prickle of her feet, sweaty, wrapped in that scratchy transfigured blanket, the bundle of it all wrapped tight like the rest of her, mummified in blankets. Then came the terror in his eyes, his moving mouth, the flick of his tongue against his crowded lower teeth, the straighter top set hidden, no words reaching her. Then the came pain and anguish, and moved like an octopus might over the depths of her pelvic floor. Then came the endless dark.

* * *

Waking, Hermione noticed Snape again. He was sat at the foot of her bed, cross-legged. He was using her angled toes to hold a book upright. He would later tell her the bed was scattered with all manner of healing texts, with parchment, and quills, and potions journals, and phials, arithmancy charts that he'd consulted _her_ notes to decode just so he'd get a glimpse of the possibility of her surviving this.

For now, however, she just noticed him, and noticed the garbled sound of his baritone clearing into something with meaning. He was reading to himself aloud—perhaps from her own tattered copy of _Paradise Lost_ that she'd started to keep on the nightstand to read before bed, before all of this—but he only voiced every other word or so, and then, in one go she heard:

'More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged / To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days, / On evil days though fall'n and evil tongues / In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, / And solitude; yet not alone, while thou / Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn / Purples the east: still govern thou my song, Urania a—'

'And fit audience find, though few,' she said, the strange and unfamiliar sound of her voice startling him into silence and herself back into the blackness.

* * *

Waking, she felt Snape's sigh on her inflamed skin, his palm pressed into her forehead and burning like frostbite. ' _Fuck_ ,' he hissed, meeting her half-lidded eyes. ' _Merlin. Fu—._ '

And he whipped his hand away, vanishing a moment before she heard the crack of apparition downstairs, vanishing before she did.

* * *

Waking, in fright, as if she'd nodded off for but a moment, Hermione quickly attempted to sit up, but found her arms and legs did not respond. Instead, the sensation of them moving entirely imagined: the ghost of a feeling all over here—another octopus crawl—and her not seeing anything but the ceiling.

'An _immobulus_?' she wondered aloud, driving the drowsiness away, but the skin of her face so tight her lips cracked, her tongue dry and bitter with potions; now her bones so painful, and the pressure upon her chest so heavy. It felt as though every rib was trying to break the skin.

'Very good,' Snape intoned somewhere out of sight, to the left of her. 'It is a . . . Dark variant and a last resort. Don't struggle.'

'What—?' And then the events that transpired before her unconsciousness flashed before her waking eyes: the hot flare of magic, the hot blood, the state of the cold bathroom. 'Please tell me I'm no longer bleeding, Professor.'

'You're not,' he said, and she heard his soft footsteps against the carpet. 'This morning it was d—'

* * *

Waking, she noticed the scent of musky leather, and she tried to see past the darkness, and saw nothing but darkness without depth. She screamed but a gloved hand gripped her jaw, pushed her cheeks in, and then the taste of blood in her mouth as the inside of her cheeks cut on her teeth. Something light and sweet and viscous glazed her teeth and tongue, but slid down her throat with the consistency of kept phlegm.

And her mother said, 'Just listen to me you cunt'— _no, no, no—_ 'on the 31st of July, after dinner and in the library, you will Turn in the bag. In the meant y—'

'Hermione! What the f—'

**= / =**

'Hermione!' he cried, running into the room at the sound of her throttled screaming. And 'Merlin,' he thought, his eyes blown wide. 'Merciful Merlin of Slytherin.' 'What the fuck is this?' he said.

Severus would sacrifice a unicorn and he would feed whatever dread beast came to him if meant the Moirai would accept his offering, that they would unspool all of Time and Fate just so he could go back and say no to Dumbledore, insist that she go with someone else— _anyone else_. And why not the Headmaster himself? And it was still not an unviable option that he should take a trip to Knockturn Alley and—. 'No,' he thought, 'if I cannot trust anyone to _Obliviate me_ , who could I trust to _Obliviate her_?'

Granger had lost consciousness again, her head lolling to the side the moment he'd raised his voice – even in this dim lighting he could see the cracking of the skin around her mouth and cheeks, the way it was red and sore and flaky from the harsh grip she'd been locked in; far worse there than it was around the rest of her body . . .

He grabbed the intruder by her arm and dragged her out, out and across the landing, and up the stairs ahead of him. Only when they cleanly passed through the wards did he let her go, shoving her into the dark room. She crashed into Granger's desk, crying out when hip bore the brunt of it, the impact of it dislodging all the notes and books the girl had carefully laid out before she'd fallen so ill. He righted them quickly and wandlessly.

'How _dare_ you?' he murmured, slamming the door behind him. She stood tall, rolled her shoulders back and turned on him, and stared so impassively he doubted whether it was truly her.

She turned around and reached for that infernal bag of Granger's laying by her desk on the floor, opening it, and rummaging. 'Self-preservation,' she answered: the bells of her once-youthful voice had melted down into a low, sonorous sound. 'I've given her—.' Severus was moving forward before he knew it, and he had her by the elbow before she could even think about stepping into the bag and down the ladder, disappearing Merlin knows where and into Merlin knows what time. She tried to wrench her arm from his grip, eyes blazing. 'Release me this instant!' she whispered.

'Which potion you—'

'No potion. A single phoenix tear.'

' _What?_ '

'From your desk. Just the one.' And with her free hand she pulled out the canister of solid gold from her dress pocket, and set it on the desk with a ear-splitting bang. 'She cannot afford to die!'

'And you know this all of this _how_?'

'I was told.'

'By whom?'

'By myself, who was told by another Hermione, who was told by another, who was told by another. Ad infinitum. Closed loop. Let me go!'

At a point, it became difficult to tell a magical being's age by appearance alone: they all lived incredibly long lives, the youthfulness of adolescence was washed away by the time they left Hogwarts, yes, but the look of young adulthood was caught on their visages for decades before any visible shift towards looking like adults proper. Of course, there were all sorts of external and experiential factors that either sped up or slowed down these things. Severus was the first to admit he was hardly the most classically attractive man—ugly as sin to so many—but even he would have still glowed of magical youth at thirty-four; as it stood, he'd been put through the gruelling boot camp of both being a half-blood Slytherin, the object of those bastard Marauders' affections, and a new Death Eater. No one had escaped the Dark Lord's service baby-faced. Even Lucius Malfoy, an objectively beautiful man by any standards, appeared decades older than he was, his forehead lined, his once-flaxen hair white from root to tip.

All of this was to say, this version of Hermione Granger looked like an adult, and she held herself like an adult, and there was something in her air that placed her beyond all naivety, beyond any sort of characteristics he could attribute to her doppelgänger prone in her bed downstairs; as such, he'd immense difficulty placing her in Time. She could be a mature witch, fresh out of Hogwarts, or in her mid-twenties, she could be as old as him, or have decades on him in age but none of the suffering. And while the latter of those scenarios was incredibly unlikely, there was no telling, and he did not imagine she'd be particularly talkative with the way she was trying to escape.

He used his other hand to tip back her head so he could perform legilimency, but she caught on quick, and screwed her eyes shut, shoving him back with all her might—her _considerable,_ magic-backed might—that had him releasing her and flying back against the door, winded, gawping at her, throbbing with the adrenaline and on the other end of her wand.

'Bastard!' she gasped, chest heaving.

She wore a long, long-sleeved black satin dress with cape that dragged behind her. The neck of the whole garment was round but pierced by a golden hook and eye at her jugular; for some infuriating reason, a slit like a keyhole showed a couple of inches of the shadow between her ample breasts, glinting with the gold snake chain of her Time-Turner wedged between them. She'd also tiny buttons on her stiff cuffs—like him, ten on either side, but crowded closely together, the place of the whole sleeve reinforced there by the triangular shape of the end of her sleeve, a fingerless glove covering most of the back of her hand, looped around her middle finger like so many of the Headmaster's older robes, like so many of the robes of the Dark Lord when he was at large, like the photographs of Grindelwald, the paintings of the Founders, of Morgana, of Merlin, but largely out of style in contemporary Wizarding Britain.

He usually wasn't one to notice the fashion choices of witches and wizards, but this was clearly an emulation of a specific and researched style, a powerful conservative statement. It was an observation that made him more uncomfortable than he was ready to admit. Either that emulation was all the truth of it and nothing more, or, in some warped future they were hurtling towards, Granger had forsaken her muggleborn roots and became the poster child of some reformed society— _but made in whose image?_ There was a stench and acrid taste of death about her, in her magic, that harked back to his life decades ago. If she'd been anything but a muggleborn, he'd think her a Death Eater. 'If I _Accio_ her mask, would it come to me?' he thought. He'd taken aside his Snakes for less.

'You _will_ let me go,' she said, watching him watch her, and then looking around the room with thirsty eyes, her wand resting in her upturned palm, balanced on the tip of her forefinger, and still on him. 'It is dangerous to stay for longer tha—.' Her eyes caught the tapestry above the hearth, and is if she were a kite cut loose, she drifted across room. 'Will this ever make sense?' she wondered aloud, back ramrod straight, hands clasped over the swell of her arse, wand already stowed away up her sleeve.

He wandlessly shot sparks past her legs and into the fireplace, and she turned her head over her shoulder and smiled so knowingly he was bludgeoned by the sight of her, lit by the dual illuminations of the already roaring fire and the bright white moonlight of the waxing gibbous above Hogwarts. Miss Granger would mature to be a singularly handsome witch – he ruminated on this fact for all of three seconds before he felt the stomach-churning disgust at thinking about one of his students in this way.

'Why are you really here?' he said, walking forward, standing beside her, facing her, her and not the infernal tapestry. She smelled of Night-Blooming Jasmine, and he was reminded at how _The Evening Prophet_ had reported just last night that the South Asian ministries believed it (rightly, he thought) to be the reason behind the Punjab's recent Occamy infestation, and had called for a cull of it in their countries since outlawing _a plant_ was impossible.

'I am compelled to perform my own history,' she said at length, and when she turned to face him, he saw the salt of dried tear tracks down her cheeks. 'You, evidently, do not know what ails her yet, and would not know had I not intervened. The first time a Hermione came back in Time it must have been to recti—. No. Nonsensical thought. Here, take this . . .'

She reached into a concealed pocked at her hip, and handed him a folded piece of parchment. The list of potions she was to take was exhaustive, their doses even more so. 'Or,' he said, thinking aloud, cataloguing all the precious ingredient he'd fritter on her health, 'I could watch her die and be rid of you both.'

'Please,' she said, properly turning on him now, a tempest, 'in your efforts to wound me, Severus, don't play the fool. I am here, I have always been here, and I will always return to this moment, nothing you can do can change that now. You must know . . .'

'Tut-tut,' he said, eyes flickering between her honey-coloured ones. 'I thought you Gryffindors were braver than this.' 'Braver than to say my name aloud,' he thought. 'Brave enough to subvert all known laws,' he said.

'Whatever nonsense you're implyi—'

In seconds, his wand was under her jaw. 'Don't test me,' he whispered, realising, oddly for the first time, that she was far taller than the girl in his parent's old bedroom, unconscious. She was almost half a foot taller, and that was without the couple of inches her heeled boots added—dragonhide, and again he was struck by the similarities between their dress.

She looked at him, plaintive, and then he felt the stabbing pain of something between his ribs. He'd not seen her draw a wand, nor utter a single spell: this was no magic. 'If I puncture your lung,' she said, digging so deep that he hissed, 'I do not know the spell to heal the tissue, nor do I have the inclination to research it fast enough. Lower your wand.'

'I will not tolerate your cheek!'

'Do you think I'll tolerate your wilful ignorance?'

'So says the bigot.'

'We have _no_ influence over our destiny,' she insisted, browed furrowed.

'Have I ever heard anything so stupid from your mouth, I wonder?' And he lowered his wand, acutely feeling that he was about to come to blows with a St Mungo's patient. She held that object of torture in front of his eyes—a blasted hairpin—and then tucked it into the haphazard bun she'd thrown her hair in. He watched her movements with his lips curled back over his teeth, unable to command his body to move, focusing on the dull pain still emanating from his side. 'So, this is who you become with that infernal thing around your neck?' he said, taking a large step away. 'A femme fatale, complacently meddling with her own life to the point of narcissism, not allowing herself a single mistake, redoing, and redoing until she's worn herself into the ground? You're no better than you were at thirteen. No brighter. Stagnant. Pitiful.'

She looked at him, amused, and then away, fiddling with clasp of her cloak at her shoulders while she spoke: 'At least I'm bright enough to not fall for your artless goading.' And the cloak was off, and when she turned and walked to throw it over the back of the three-seat Queen Anne she'd favoured from the moment she set foot in here, he averted his eyes and adjusted his cock. The back of her dress down to her waist was a sheet of sheer black chiffon, split down the middle with tiny satin-covered buttons. She had a small red birthmark on her right shoulder blade, three dark beauty marks and a tiny mole in its orbit. When she turned back around to face him, sinking into the sofa, she said with a dark smile, 'Flirting will get us nowhere good.'

' _Excuse me?_ '

'"Femme fatale" didn't you say?'

The heat that had gripped his whole body over these transpiring few minutes reached his neck and cheeks and ears. He was infamous for his rapier wit but nothing particularly cutting or amusing or droll entered his brain. It had been a long time since he'd been in the company of a woman like this— _Severus, have you ever met a woman like this?—_ and he was all but a fumbling and maladroit virgin. Those thoughts made him pause: when had he gone from treating this version of Granger as a parasite of circumstance to an object upon which he could exercise the whims of his febrile libido? Evidently, she was attractive, but, by his own moral standards if not those of wizarding society at large, she was forbidden.

'Where will it get us?' he asked, registering her words, wandering, weak, to sit beside her. 'If nowhere good, where else?'

'Is this a ploy to get me to stay?'

'You'd already decided to stay. Answer me.'

She twisted her hips, and shifted one knee up onto the seat, and that knee pressed against his thigh, and the move wrung his gut like a wet dishcloth, watching her spread herself. She leaned her head against the back of the tan Chesterfield, all but moaned, 'Someplace warm.' Said, 'Somewhere with sage-green bedlinen, and . . . Yes, someplace where we can hear the neighbours breathe through the dividing wall and know they cannot hear us. You, Severus, into a slick and untouched place, and me? Nowhere good, like I said.'

He gritted his teeth and could not bear to move, harder than he had been in years, maybe all his life. He thought of his lit fireplace, wondered why he was idiot enough to not link it to the Floo so he could escape her easily; he hadn't the confidence to apparate at the moment. 'You've been in my bedroom?' he murmured, the heat of the fire in front of him doing no good thing for what lay in his trousers.

'Yes.'

'When?'

'It doesn't matter.'

'Would you like us to—'

'No.'

'No?'

'No.'

'Lie better.'

'We cannot fu—'

'You are _nothing_ like her,' he said, his hands gripping the wool of his trousers.

She chuckled. 'Would you rather I was?'

'Don't be so crass.'

'Yes, it's better this way,' she said, 'gives you distance. Though, I see you presume to know her at all. You don't; realise that now and rectify it before she's moved beyond your ken. If I remember well, all you've done so far is push her away, brew your teas and your curries, indicate your boundaries. You have done _fuck all_ . . . while she's been trying to _stave off_ the rise of the Dark Lord.'

' _Merlin_ ,' he thought. ' _Bloody Merlin_.' Alarm and fear, a panic that he'd not felt since discovering his Master had visited Godric's Hollow on Halloween almost thirteen years ago. He barely had a moment to think. 'Show me . . . your arm,' he said, slow.

She turned, pressed her whole forehead into the sofa, laughing softly. 'Will you show me yours?' she cooed, turning her head, eyes venomous.

Severus had turned in his seat before she'd even finished; Severus had cancelled the sticking charm and tugged back the left sleeve of his navy jumper to his bicep; and Severus had showed the muggleborn chit Hermione Granger there, in the burning firelight, the Mark—the colour of driftwood today. The skull began at the inside crease of his elbow, the serpent winding its loops over his veined forearm, it's tongue forked in the middle of his wrist. It was much larger than his so-called brothers: for some, a penalty for his impure blood; for others, like Silvanus, a wordless avowal writ large; for him, it was simply the reason why he spent his life in long sleeves, held in place with magic.

'And _you_ presume I have something to hide,' he said, feeling himself slipping into his old role, a scarred body into a lake of Murtlap Essence; more Janus than Quirrell; with far less to lose than the last time. Severus could not believe how quickly it had come to this.

'On the other hand,' she said, trailing a burning forefinger over the Mark's throbbing tongue, his blood pumping hard under it, 'I've everything to hide.'

He blinked. 'Is that it?' he said, snatching his arm away from her caress, and the bile high in his throat. He tugged his sleeve down, and the furious heat returned to his neck. 'You speak of _him_ in my presence and daren't unveil—?'

'If I show you my arm,' she said, interrupting him, looking through him almost, 'I still end up here. If I don't, I still do. Nothing we do here has any bearings on our fate. I will still become this. You will st—' And she stopped dead, seemingly coming to a quick descion, and she began unbuttoning her cuff, threaded her finger out of the loop of fabric, and peeled it back. 'See my devotion?'

**= / =**

Waking, it was dark, but she could hear the scratch of his quill, could feel the dip at the end of the bed where he sat.

'Professor?'

The whole bed shook from how hard she'd startled him. ' _Fuck's sake!_ '

'Professor Snape? What happened?'

Silence, silence so long she doubted she was even awake.

'Nothing,' he said. 'You've just made me ruin an irreplaceable quill nib. Are you lucid?'

'Sorry . . . I don't know,' she said, the panic tight in her throat. 'I don't know.'

'Don't speak then,' he said. 'Just listen . . .' And he informed Hermione of how, over a period of two days, she'd bled and bled more than he thought one ever could. She'd worked through three packets of ultra-absorbent maxi pads, and all but ruined four sets of his linen. She thrashed day and night as her magic ran uninhibited in her body, and he'd been forced to stabilise her with the _Immobulus_ variant—Snape had attempted to help her in that state with potions and spells so she would not hurt herself, would not soil herself further, but little worked bar this. And perhaps there was some mercy in this, she reckoned, mercy in knowing that she did not consciously suffer, that she was cared for. Perhaps the Moirai saved her from the humiliation more than the pain, saved her from the dead hours, the waiting of tissues to come clean. 'I would have brewed the standard salve for menstrual cramps, but . . .'

'But what?' she prompted, staring at the ceiling, looking at the way the moonlight filtered past the drapes and into the room.

'It is a _salve_.'

'Have I contracted Dragon Pox, too?' she asked, affronted. 'Tuberculosis?'

'I could not presume to touch your body without your consent!'

Hermione sighed; it was in relief, which shocked her immensely. She distinctly remembered in the lead up to her body and womb throwing in the towel, that those days were spent in an uneasy yearning for the older man; how many hours did she spend thinking about him and not her work? He'd say too many she was certain. Her mind, then, felt like it was possessed by _something,_ something so powerful she'd stopped thinking about Pettigrew and Voldemort, her task for the summer, and thought only of this _man._ Why? Why did she do that? Not that she'd doubted Severus Snape's character, but Hermione was astonished to be relieved, astonished to find herself reassured that he'd stayed away from the balms and the salves, that he'd not spend time massaging her skin without her knowledge, astonished because for days at a time she'd craved not food nor water but just a glimpse of him.

'Besides, there are other . . . Right now you are und—'

'Thank you,' she said, trying once again to command her body to move and failing. 'That must have been difficult.'

He was silent for some time. 'There was another reason, Miss G—'

' _Please_ ,' she said, flinching. 'Call me Hermione?'

And he quickly and easily conceded, 'Only because you're unwell.' She was surprised this alertness seemed to hold past that point, that she was not forced back under and waking the next moment.

'I'm unwell?' she asked. 'Still?'

'In a manner of speaking,' Snape said. He then moved and stood up, walking around to perch on the side of her bed, facing her. Snape, disarmingly, wore a grey shirt with _four_ buttons undone at the top, he'd tied half his hair back: he'd been amongst muggles then, grocery shopping perhaps.

'Hello,' she said, smiling, lips tight and dry.

He bowed his head, his eyes more gentle than she'd known before. 'Hermione.'

And, suddenly, ethics be damned, she wished he'd brewed the balm. And, suddenly, she knew there was something very wrong with her: she'd never known herself to be so flighty with her emotions. Something within was working against.

'Will you release the petrification charm?' she asked. 'Please?'

There was something different about his eyes then, something beyond mere hesitancy. But he moved his wand from his sleeve to his hand and did as she asked, an electric rush seizing her body for a moment before dissipating to her lower stomach and throbbing there. 'No sudden movements,' he said. 'No getting out of bed. Not until I ex—.'

But she was already moving, already forgetting who she was, forgetting who he was, what was expected of them, all of it shot, when she, despite the clicking and cracking of her joints, despite the alarm bells in her mind, forced just the fingertips of her right hand around the tightly wrapped blankets, the eiderdown, and rested it around his warm wand hand on the bed. 'Thank you,' she said, squeezing, 'for everything you've done and everything you'll do.' And 'God,' she thought, 'what's the matter with my voice?'

'You needn't,' he said and then, knowing that she was pushing her luck, she let him go and brought her arm back under, rested it on her lower stomach. But why was there no fabric there? Why was it skin that she touched?

' _What the h—?_ '

* * *

Waking, she noticed Snape's deep murmured singing coming from downstairs, the blunt sound of a knife quick against a chopping board. She noticed that she was no longer under the petrification charm, and—with wandering hands over her stomach—that she was still naked. The hands went lower and discovered her folds hairless, her inner thighs sticky with sweat; went higher and found swelling flesh spilling over her ribs and into her armpits; skin, everywhere, as tight as a drum.

Hermione acknowledged the dark, let it take her.

* * *

Waking, Hermione noticed Snape standing and tucking away his wand, folding his arms. The abruptness and clarity of her sight and thoughts told her he'd just performed a _Renervate._

'I'm sorry,' he said, startling her, perching on the edge of her bed by her stomach, when she realised her limbs were still responding, and she was still unclothed, she twitched her hand and he delivered her a reproachful glare. 'For my own conscience,' he said, pausing after every word, 'I can no longer continue without informing you that . . . that which we discussed is in motion.'

'Sorry? What's going—.'

Snape cleared his throat and he looked down at her with his impenetrable gaze. 'Do you remember our hypothesis?' he said but hardly waited for an answer. 'Over these past days, I have observed certain changes in your physiology and, all, indeed, are augmented and accelerated by the menstruation and the malnourishment potion.'

She could hardly understand what those words meant. 'What hypothesis?' she thought. Hermione listened to Snape quietly and methodically detail the long list of brews she was now taking, and when it dawned on her, it took every bit of Hermione's willpower not to immediately beginning groping herself – then she remembered she _had_ done that when she'd woken before, the memory of it as hazy as a dream had several days ago.

Puberty, at last,came for Hermione Granger, as quick as a snitch, but striking her with the force of a bludger.

Snape had apparently already put her on a course of muscle relaxants that she took four times a day; the malnourishment potion she took three times a day instead of the one; the Blood-Replenishing Potion every three hours; she drank something that ordered her enhanced hormone production; a tincture for the stretchmarks; a calorific meal replacement wafer that dissolved on her tongue; Milk of Poppy for the pain and Dreamless Sleep to combat the dreams it induced; something to keep her innards and body squeaky clean and her bladder empty; and, recently, he'd given her a depilatory for her body hair that would last her "some time".

'My body is . . . a _cauldron_.'

'Hyperbole that is not. I take it I don't need to explain why you're nude?' he said, in his inexpressive timbre.

'The Third Principal Exception to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration,' she murmured, blushing. 'No fiddling with anything you wear.' And she remembered how utterly confused and fascinated she was when she was taught about this. 'Not even a mitten.'

'Indeed. You have already outgrown everything you own, and, at present, I cannot leave you here to buy anything else.'

She'd once spent several days of Adjustment time properly reading up on the subject. In the end, like with most magics, it came down to intent: anyone, muggle or human, spent hours of their existence _intentionality_ creating or buying a material, intentionally measuring, cutting the pattern shapes, stitching, all for the garment to rest and hang in a certain way upon the body and no way but; in the magical world even more so, as most garments were tailor made, even the ones of cheaper fabrics. The devotion of seamstresses and shoemakers to their work was sacrosanct and the secrets of the craft as closely guarded as wandlore. Hermione had spent a whole day reading on the history of Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions, a shop on the northern side of Diagon Alley that had, among other garments for other customers, been making clothes for the students and professors of Hogwarts for almost as long as there'd been a school. Even the notorious Weasley Christmas jumpers were impervious to transfiguration, much to Ron's constant and everlasting displeasure. There was a _very_ small theoretical possibility, however, that should one _intend_ to transfigure a garment into something else, and do so with enough passion and resolve, magic may yield, may undo itself and that jumper may transfigure into, say, a water goblet, but who was ever so in need of one? Magic hardly cared about such trivial things. And, in any case, this small theoretical possibility was true of all Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration.

Hermione thought on all her clothes that we now destined for the charity shop wholesale; it was a good thing her parents regularly paid an allowance into her Gringotts account and that Dumbledore had handed her a rather large remuneration for her work this summer – she was going to make a significant dent in it with everything she intended to purchase. And while she was not fond of making lists, she'd unquestionably have to make one.

Snape and Hermione lapsed into silence, and she got the distinct feeling that he was waiting for her to pass out again, but nothing of the sort happened, so a different sort of anxious atmosphere permeated the room: like, perhaps, seeing someone fall from their broom. When, out of the stillness, she felt a ghostly half-remembered vision of herself hovering over _her_ speaking dreadful and foul words, she hit the ground.

* * *

Waking and waking and waking, Hermione became acutely aware that it was not simply puberty that ailed her, no, it was something much more advanced than that: womanhood. Her body and magic prepared her, plunged her towards a phase of her life that she thought she'd wait more than ten years for. Confined to her bed as she was, as naked as she was, she could track by the flaring of various aches and pains that she and Snape were presiding over a titanic transformation of her body. Before their eyes her skeleton and blood and dermis was morphing as if she were under the effects of a slow-acting Polyjuice. Though her flesh did not bubble and roil before her eyes, in the days that followed Hermione's return to a normal cycle of lucidity and slumber, she noticed her skin grew more and more sheer, taut over the slopes of entirely new terrain, like pizza dough over knuckles.

Nightly she'd sleep having groped herself, cupped her breasts in fascination, peeping under the sheets, looking down at the web of blue veins under her pale skin, and wake to find them even heavier and sore, the peaks rigid. Once, last winter, she had heard Parvati and Lavender speak about a, well, "peak breast size" – 'a handful is all you ever need,' Lavender said, 'anything more is a pain' – and Parvati had hummed in agreement, said that perhaps this was why her mother complained of a backache so often. Hermione would have backaches aplenty, she was sure of it. Worst of all, she could not bear to sleep on her side at all, all because her widening hips were an utterly foreign adjunct on her once gamine body, and they hurt always. They were hips for twins, if she was to put any more faith in her dormmates lore.

Hermione's face, which she'd been told would periodically break out into a spate of pimples once a day, worked itself out on its own. 'It's as if it did not even happen,' he'd reassured her, waving a hand dismissively. Except, Hermione could not dismiss this – could not treat anything that was happening so flippantly; whatever this was, it was serious enough that even when in this state, feeling as if she could die at any given moment, some version of herself in the future had visited her, and informed her that she was going to be Turning soon. She _was_ going to survive this, evidently, but who knew what life after the 31st of July would look like?

One morning, when Hermione stirred with her feet hooked over the edge of the bed, every inch of her body on fire. She had no recollection of what happened to her in the resultant shock, even if her eyes had been wide open the whole time. This was a change that even he could not dismiss. Snape told her in that infuriating monotone that contradicted his own concern, that she was now exactly 175cm tall, that she'd grown more than 15cm in _a single night._ Hermione wept until she'd passed out, inconsolable. How was she going to explain _this_? How could she explain any of this? It felt an eternity ago when she'd wondered whether she'd be a Molly Weasley or a Madame Sinistra – the question felt abhorrently naïve now. Hermione could not bear to think about her body, it's new place in her life, and yet it was all that was on her mind; that, yes, and her enduring doctor.

Hermione dreaded to think on the effects of her ill health on the unassailable man, and what it meant for their tentative bond in the short-term never mind the long. 'Well,' she thought, 'insomuch as there _was_ a bond in the first place.' Though he was not undergoing almost a decade of growth over a week, though he had not bled a torrent out of one of his intimate orifices in her presence, she could see both a weariness and gentleness present in him. Snape had been at her constant beck and call, attending to her like any good healer, and all without complaint, all with a disquieting level of compassion.

Despite the conventions they'd set in the first week or so of her stay at Spinner's End, Snape had now even started to cook them three square, hearty, and calorific meals every day, which she took instead of the morning wafer, though he still regularly charmed her insides clean. She'd worked out a way to wrap one of his linens around her that would conceal what needed to be concealed, held together by sticking charms, and ate with the duvet tucked into her armpits. And while it was an abject nuisance—a fold dipping into her tomato soup, no range of motion to properly bite into a pleasantly sour green apple with the appropriate vigour, etc—she never once asked for an alternative. She thought about asking Snape for one of his many jumpers, or even telling her about her father's that she kept with her just for his smell, but some foreign feeling stopped her. Hermione would sit for hours and try not to stare too hard at the man who, during the long days of summer, maintained a faithful silence on the other side of her bed – staring out the window, down at his books, his eyes still and not reading. Occasionally, they made small talk, but for the most part it was a tense silence, both stubbornly avoiding the occasional creaking of the floorboards above, the Other that tip-toed around the house as if she weren't there.

'I refuse to speak of her and to her,' he'd said the first time she'd jumped out of her skin, crying, 'Somebody's in the house!' He'd began pacing the carpet, from the wall of plant studies to the windows, and said in his usual ministering tone, 'You must not let her presence have any bearings on what you do and think, Hermione. She is not you. That woman is demented and nonsensical, she has Time Sickness far more acute than you did when you arrived here. I've given her the potion. She'll be gone by the end of the month.' Then he continued with his tea at the foot of her bed—something he did daily. Usually, he kept something nearby to read aloud from—the _Daily_ _Prophet,_ the _Evening Prophet_ , potions journals, and, once or twice, muggle poetry _—_ and she tried not to notice how it was impossible to lean his book up against her toes and read comfortably as he'd once done; that night he mentioned The Other Hermione, he'd read nothing.

'Demented and nonsensical?' she thought. 'Acute Time Sickness? Is that what awaits me?' No wonder Professor Snape was so livid.

Thankfully, over the days, Hermione's magic had learned to behave, but it behaved in ways and intensities that were completely foreign. There was no juvenile tide of inertia and volatility. Hermione's magic was not biding its time, and it did not require coaxing from her core to her wand-tip. The magic was present and dangerous and heady in her and eager to be used; magic was always there, waving its hand in the air, knowing the answer before the question was posed. While it still had not indicated any shift from the reserve in her belly, Snape had dismissed this as only indicative as her Dark affinity, and had given a shake of his head to her questions of whether that would change. 'Not worth fixating over,' he said, so she fixated.

To top it all off Hermione, for the first time in her life, was combatting something she could label as definitively Sexual Arousal. This was that _foreign feeling_ that forced her to sit in front of her Potions Professor with not a stitch of proper clothes on her body, this was what had her complain of aching hips and thighs and ribs when, at best, there was _some_ twinge of tenderness. She relished the flickering of his eyes over her, the single-minded tenacity with which he sought to soothe her with spells and potions; and then, while he healed her, she rued her manipulation.

Of course, the onset of arousal was made worse by the initial inability to tell it apart from this heightened magical current within her. Once she experienced her first orgasm, however, there was no such confusion. Then she truly realised that she'd never even remotely felt this way before coming to Spinner's End—there was nothing like this, not even some cousin feeling, not even magic. Hermione had known from a foray into a muggle biology textbook and more overheard conversations in her dorm, that, like a pinball machine, arousal would hit all these regions in her psyche and body, all regions that Hermione was suddenly very attuned to. Her body, she knew now, had an altered biology, it was disparate from a muggle's, but it was not magic that left her intimate folds so embarrassingly wet that she could hardly feel herself, her body so boneless.

Twice she'd seen in dawn this way, with thoughts of Professor Snape alone. He was her Potions Professor, yes, and she his student; he was twice her age; and she'd hardly the experience to be able to gauge whether this attractiveness to Snape was something borne of circumstance, or some deeper feeling in her. Statistically, it was far more likely to be the former, more likely to be the simple fact that he was a man and the only man who had ever paid her any notice, and her fixation on him would change when there was another paying her the same attention. Yes. Maybe she would masturbate to thoughts of Harry or Ron or Seamus Finnegan or Neville Longbottom, maybe even the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher once she was back at school. God, she would have fun trying if nothing else.

Hermione owed Severus Snape her life—she did not have to conjure an arithmancy matrix to know—but it was becoming clearer by the day that should she want to want to emerge from this with some self-respect, weaning herself off him and his help, rather than have the decision made for her in a fit of frustration, was essential. And hadn't Dumbledore told her that she was to keep to herself and not bother the man, and that Snape had his own tasks for the summer? And—she sighed and sighed at the thought—wouldn't she be Turning on the 31st, regardless of not knowing the details at present? She'd relied on him for too much and for too long.


End file.
